S Lalitha By

BENGALURU: Unprecedented response to online train ticket booking has prompted the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to start the process of making its website failproof.

A record 1.09 lakh passengers booked tickets online on April 1 for trains originating from Bengaluru, Mysuru and Hubballi railway divisions. The Indian Railways kickstarted its 120-day advance booking period for reserved tickets from that day.

“Revenue earned by the South Western Railway (SWR) division on that day alone totalled `8.8 crore, which is a big record,” V Ganapathy Subramanian, Deputy General Manager (DGM), Information Technology Department, South Zone of IRCTC, told Express over phone from Chennai.

“The passenger figure refers to those who begin their journey from any of the stations within the SWR division. Booking could have been done from any part of the world,” the DGM said.

This figure is a significant chunk of the all-India record of 32 lakh (32,16,039) passengers booking tickets on the website (www.irctc.co.in) that day. The Railways earned a whopping `200 crore.

Dr A K Manocha, Chairman and Managing Director of IRCTC, who was in Bengaluru recently, told Express, “What really stood out was the fact that an unprecedented 20,000 train tickets were booked in one minute for journeys all over India on April 1 and the website did not crash. This took us by surprise as we had only seen a maximum booking of 17,000 tickets per minute on a particular day in 2014.”

Nearly 60 per cent of all train tickets in India are now being booked online. “With 2.5 crore registered members on our portal, maximum for any website globally, a further rise in bookings is expected,” Manocha said.

Hackathon

Bearing this in mind, IRCTC now plans to organise a national-level hackathon for its website. “We want to make the site absolutely secure and ensure it can cope with even bigger volumes of web traffic,” Manocha added.

Subramanian said the hackathon would be organised in Chennai, Bengaluru or Secunderabad within one or two months.

The website, which is now among the biggest e-commerce websites in the world, kickstarted its operations on August 3, 2002, with a booking of 27 tickets. It started as an I-ticketing site where tickets could be booked online but would be couriered to the address before the journey. The portal was then equipped to handle a maximum of 1,200 tickets per minute.

The Next Generation E-ticketing (NGeT) System, launched on April 13, 2014, was a gamechanger, the DGM said. It speeded up booking hugely, enabling a minimum of 7,200 tickets to be booked in a minute and transformed a tedious online process into a very quick and user-friendly one.

“A private firm, Broad Vision, used to handle online bookings earlier. But for NGeT, both Passenger Reservation System and IRCTC bookings were entrusted to the Chennai-based Centre for Railways Information Systems (CRIS),” he added.

A massive server that has been installed and upgradation turned out to be the main reasons the bookings went on unhindered on April 1.

A lucky draw scheme, launched by IRCTC from January 1, 2015 could also be motivating people to opt for online booking, Manocha said.

Under this scheme, new users of the site who register and book at least one ticket are eligible for a monthly lucky draw. The prizes on offer are an Apple Macintosh laptop for first prize winner, an iPhone 6 each for second and third, and the fourth winner gets a New Delhi-Mata Rani package (Vaishnodevi temple)for four.