Title - IRCTC website to book 7,200 tickets per minute

With the aim of bridging the gap between demand and supply in e-ticketing category, IRCTC on Monday spelt out its grand plan to book 7,200 e-tickets per minute in the current fiscal.

Currently, the ticketing site of the IRCTC is able to handle about 1.2 lakh concurrent connections on web servers and can book about 2,000 tickets per minute.

In a detailed presentation of its upgrading, IRCTC Managing Director R K Tandon explained the action plan for capacity enhancement to the Railway Minister CP Joshi at a review meeting here.

It would cost about Rs. 100 crore to Railways for strengthening the ticketing site.

A power point presentation was made before the Railway Minister about the plan to strengthen the website to enable it for booking 7,200 tickets per minute, said a senior Railway Ministry official.

Besides Joshi, Railway Board Chairman Vinay Mittal and CRIS Managing Director Sunil Kumar were also present.

CRIS, the technical arm of railways, is involved in the upgrading of the IRCTC website.

The official said the upgrading of website is a continuous process as an average booking per day has been increased from 3.67 lakh in 2012 to 4.15 lakh now.

There are about 31 crore reserve tickets being booked in a year out of which 55 percent tickets are sold through windows. While 37 percent tickets are booked online, eight percent are being booked by ticketing agents.

Tendering process for upgrading of software and strengthening of hardware is on as per the Rail Budget announcement, said the official.

Former Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal had announced in his Rail Budget 2013-14 that the booking capacity will be enhanced to 7,200 tickets per minute with the development of next generation software for the e-ticketing site.

Generally there is a huge load on the website at 10 AM, when booking of Tatkal tickets opens. The booking of ticket varies from time to time based on festival and vacations.