There is not a single person in India who is online and has not been frustrated at least once by IRCTC, the online ticket portal for Indian Railways.
While, the portal has been a boon for all of us (Imagine going to a railway station to book a ticket now), it is flawed at best. Currently, the system is capable of handling 2000 ticket bookings per minute with around 1.2 lakh connections simultaneously.
This is a decent figure if you consider that most of the time the number of tickets booked is less than this. The problem is that this is not the peak value. At its peak time during 10:00 am to 12:00 pm (tatkal period), the number of users increase manifold and it results in crashing of the site.
Also, the average bookings per day have increased from 3.67 lakh to 4.15 lakh. This number is going to increase as more people are becoming tech-savvy.
The ease of use of online booking is too much to ignore. Already in our country, 37% of the tickets are being booked online. Considering the percentage of people actually having internet connections shows that many people who do not have internet connections at home might be doing that as well via friends or other sources.
Railways obviously knows this as well as the benefits of having a better online portal. Thus, they have a plan in place to improve and the website. In fact, the plan is to increase the bookings to 7200 bookings per minute.
The whole project is of around Rs. 100 crore and CRIS, the technical arm of railways, will be involved in the upgrade of the website. In my personal opinion, 100 crores is little too much for the kind of traffic IRCTC website get – However, the most important aspect is after spending that kind of money, the IRCTC website should handle any kind of booking load without an issue!
Another question is, will there be any other feature developments in the site itself? The site currently is fairly basic (useful but basic) and can be definitely improved, especially on the UI and UX front. The latter is especially missing.
For one, I would like to see the feature that I can message the ticket to any mobile number I want even after I have booked the ticket. Also, if I can see the alternate paths to the destination (like in airlines) it would be great for people who have to go where the train doesn’t connect directly.
Everything said, the improvements in speed and stability are most important and it is a welcoming to see the government focusing on it regarding the railways.
[…] a year back CRIS started working on IRCTC upgrade project that cost an estimated 180 crore and it is now live. The new upgraded platform will will a capacity […]