Railway to Introduce Next Generation E-Ticketing System.

   The Minister of Railways Shri Pawan Kumar Bansal has that his Ministry will put in place a Next Generation e-ticketing system to bring about a paradigm shift in internet rail ticketing. Presenting the Railway Budget for 2013-14 in Parliament today he said, the new system will significantly improve the end user experience in respect of ease of use, response time as well as capacity. He said, the new system shall be able to support 7200 tickets per minute as against 2000 tickets per minute at present. It will support 1, 20,000 simultaneous users at any point in time against the present capacity of 40,000 users with capability to easily scale up as demand increases in future. The Minister said, the system will make use of advanced fraud control and security management tools thereby further improving fairness and transparency in disbursal of tickets.

   The Minister also announced several IT initiatives for the benefit of passengers. These are:

   i.    Extending availability of the facility of internet ticketing from 0030 hours to 2330 hours;

   ii.    Making e-ticketing possible through mobile phones;

   iii.    As a follow up to overwhelming response to Indian Railway website and Integrated Train Enquiry Service under “139”, a project of SMS Alerts to passengers providing updates on reservation status is being rolled out shortly;

   iv.    Covering larger number of trains under Real Time Information System (RTIS), whereby rail-users will be able to access information through nominated websites and mobile phones.

PIB

Online Reservation of Train Tickets.

   The change in the timings of Tatkal was made effective from 10.7.2012. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website recorded its highest booking of 4.95 lakh e-tickets in a single day on 13th July, 2012. The average internet ticket booking was around 3.74 lakh per day in the month of October 2012.

   In case of fully waitlisted tickets on which all the passengers are waitlisted, the names of all the passengers booked on that ticket are dropped from the reservation charts and refunds are credited to the respective bank accounts. Refunds of waitlisted e-tickets are processed by the system and the money is credited automatically into the account of the concerned. For expediting the processing of confirmed e-tickets, on which refunds are sought after chart preparation, the following measures have been taken:

Service Charge on Booking of E-Tickets.

   The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) doe not levy any charges on cancellation of e-tickets on account of non-confirmation. A nominal service charge of Rs. 10/- per PNR for e-ticket issued for Sleeper & reserved Second Sitting (2S) and Rs. 20/- per PNR for e-tickets in other classes is charged. The service charge realized is used to meet Administrative cost, Maintenance cost of IT hardware and software, technical manpower costs of service providers, recurring expenditure like rent, electricity charges, internet bandwidth charges, cost for investments in capacity enhancement and also replacement of obsolete IT equipments etc.

Transaction Failures in E-Ticket Booking.

   During the period from April 2011 to March 2012, while 11.62 crore tickets were booked successfully through the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website, in 96.12 lakh cases payment was settled but tickets were not booked.

   In May 2012 and June 2012, in 13.19 lakh and 11.41 lakh cases respectively payment were settled but tickets were not booked. The reasons for such incomplete transaction included non availability of lower berths, entry of wrong password, network failure etc.

   In addition to regular monitoring of the system, the following measures have been taken to improve the functioning of the IRCTC website: