IRCTC ticketing: Why the real challenge isn't tech but trains

The new IRCTC website promised by July 15 may resolve booking glitches, but it cannot eliminate the huge capacity shortfall that railways itself acknowledges

When railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently declared, following complaints of CAPTCHA hurdles, OTP delays, payment failures and booking glitches from a student at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT) Jaipur, that a new-look IRCTC website would be launched by July 15, it appeared to be an ideal case of responsive governance in the digital age.

A citizen (a student) pointed out an issue. The minister intervened. A solution was offered immediately. And the news went viral. Yet, the question that got far less focus over the years is that Indian Railways has been on the verge of offering the same solution, in one form or the other, for over a decade.

That’s important because IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) has never been just another government website. It’s perhaps the most significant public-facing digital asset of the railways.

Some 90 per cent of reserved railway tickets are now booked online, according to a parliamentary reply tabled in December last year. For millions of passengers, the railway journey begins on the screen of a phone or computer, navigating the user experience that IRCTC dishes out. That experience of booking a ticket often shapes perceptions of Indian Railways long before a train reaches the platform.

Successive administrations have recognised this reality. The reservation system has undergone several rounds of upgrades, capacity expansion and redesign. The Next Generation e-Ticketing System was implemented to boost booking capacity. It was followed by the Rail Connect mobile application in 2017. In December 2020, the railways launched a new website and mobile app, which it claimed would be faster, easier to use and more customer-friendly.

In another reply to Parliament, the railways has stated that the remodelled platform allowed for search of trains, AI-based suggestions of stations, waitlist prediction, integrated services and improved transparency of refunds. The same response involved a dramatic increase in booking capacity, from around 2,000 tickets a minute before to over 25,000 tickets a minute after the Next Generation e-Ticketing System was implemented. The system peaked on March 5, 2020, with a record 26,458 tickets booked within a minute.

But that’s hardly the point. A website redesign can help reduce friction during the booking process, but it cannot generate capacity out of nothing. Indian Railways’ own planning documents acknowledge a deeper constraint. The National Rail Plan was launched to address capacity shortages and congestion across the network, noting that about over 40 per cent of the network was operating at more than 80 per cent capacity utilisation, while large parts of the High Density Network—carrying some of the country’s busiest passenger and freight traffic—were already heavily congested. Successive railway expansion programmes, including the Dedicated Freight Corridors and multi-tracking projects, have been driven by the same reality: demand on key routes has outpaced available capacity.

The challenge extends beyond tracks. Audits by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India have highlighted bottlenecks at stations, terminals, pit lines and stabling facilities, which can limit train-handling capacity even when coaches and locomotives are available. On many trunk routes, the problem is not merely of securing a ticket but that there are often more passengers seeking berths than the system can accommodate.

That helps explain why confirmed tickets remain difficult to obtain on many popular trains, particularly during Tatkal booking windows and peak travel periods. A better-designed website may make the race fairer. But it cannot eliminate the underlying shortage of berths even if the deck is window-dressed.

And the size of the deck is massive. Parliament has been told that over 490 million passengers had booked tickets through the IRCTC application in 2018-19. The figure rose to over 520 million in 2019-20. However, with growth and proliferation of facilities, passenger complaints did not completely fade away.

Most of the criticism has been about the CAPTCHA loops, re-verification, delayed OTPs, failed transactions and slowdowns at the website during Tatkal booking. Not one of these complaints is particularly new. These grievances have erupted over and over during the various stages of technology generations, re-design and software updates.

What users often overlook, or are even oblivious to, is that much of the brickbats the impugned website and the public sector undertaking running it gets are, in fact, the result of railways’ software firm, the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), which handles the backend.

At present, railways is already in the final stages of a much-needed upgrade to its ticketing infrastructure, notwithstanding the re…