Imagine buying something for Rs5,000 and then being given a bill of Rs12,000, all because of a small asterisk which says 'fares may increase at the time of booking'.

Thane resident Shyam Nair was subject to what he called a very cruel joke when he got a bill of Rs11,904 after he booked two premium tatkal tickets on the 16345 Kurla-Thiruvananthapuram Netravati Express on Friday morning. The ticket rate being flashed on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website at the time of booking was Rs2,145.

Speaking to dna, Nair said, "Time is such an important factor when you are booking on the IRCTC website, even a second lost is a ticket lost. I started my booking session with the price of the ticket mentioned as Rs2,145.

After I booked two tickets under the premium tatkal quota, I got an alert from my SBI account, which showed that Rs11,904 had been debited. The fare had increased to Rs5,930. I paid Rs11,860 for the two tickets, with Rs44 as service charge."

What has galled Nair is the fact that on several travel portals a flight ticket between Mumbai and Trivandrum was going at around Rs7,000. "I could have paid a bit more and got two flight tickets, saving almost a day of travelling. It is appalling that the railways calls itself a public utility and works at such abysmal levels of transparency," fumed Nair.

The bad news for commuters is that according to IRCTC there is nothing much that can be done to rectify such a situation when it comes to premium tatkal tickets. Explaining the problem, Sunil Kumar, group general manager, (information technology) IRCTC, said, "There is something called the inquiry time and the booking time. The problem is that in premium tatkal, as each class on a train will have just around 10-15 premium tatkal tickets that can be booked from computers nationwide, the booking is so quick that price changes between inquiry time and booking time. In a matter of less than a minute, a premium tatkal ticket will reach the upper limit (three times the base fare). It is possible that in this case, the same thing happened."

According to Kumar, the small number of premium tatkal tickets available per class per train and the quick speed of the transactions mean displaying the booking time fare — the one the commuter actually pays — is technically impossible.

Passenger associations are unwilling to take it lying down, with the All-Thane Malayalee Association (ATMA) planning to approach railway authorities about what it called railway-approved fraud. "It is high time commuters start protesting. The commuter books thinking s/he is paying the base fare but ends up paying the premium fare that railway calculates in some manner only it knows. This is unacceptable," said Sashikumar Nair of the ATMA.