Title - Tatkal tickets: How agents beat Net traffic

NEW DELHI: Touts and illegal agents have found novel ways to bypass the heavy traffic to IRCTC's Tatkal booking site, log on quickly and corner tickets at will.

Tatkal tickets, as the name suggests, can be booked 24 hours ahead of journey and touts say their businesses run on their ability to beat the traffic. One of those TOI talked to, claimed he was always a "step ahead of others".

Step one, he said, was to use a non-MTNL net connection. "In India, MTNL is the preferred service provider, so traffic on the IRCTC site from BSNL servers is very heavy. A good way out: Draft a friend living in a foreign land to login. Tell him to book the ticket for you. The friend will access IRCTC from a different server. For him, it'll be a breeze. Seamlessly, he'll buy your ticket and clear out," he explains.

"Here's another tip," he says. "Enabling the lowspeed connection option in your browser (some browsers like Opera have it) even while using high-speed internet works wonders. This results in faster loading of a page."

If IRCTC thought stopping usage of one IP address to book multiple tickets can stop touting, here's how touts mock this safety feature. "Switch off your modem and turn it on again. You have a new IP address. This is because most service providers use dynamic IP addresses,'' the agent says. It is also possible to login using multiple IDs from different browsers, yet again beating IRCTC's efforts to offer restricted access to travel agencies.

Synchronize your computer clock with the IRCTC site time and start booking exactly after 8am. Those who try in the first few seconds after 8am have a better chance of booking, he says.

Agents, though, say it takes "homework, practice and diligence'' to complete the bookings lightning fast. "First, we find available trains, select source and destination of travel. Most important is to zero in on the train where getting confirmations is easiest. A maximum of four passengers can travel on a Tatkal ticket. We keep their details ready and use Forefox's auto-fill feature to fill them in quickly.''

He suggests no passenger must waste time on the "Quick book" option that the IRCTC site offers. "Under ordinary circumstances, if you fill the form quickly and press quick book, it should reach a banking site without asking for any further verification and confirmation. Very few know IRCTC has blocked this from 8 am to 9 am making the tool useless,'' he smiles.