SUPERFAST TICKETING

Set to launch in months, India Railways' new reservation system will replace a 40-year-old software system with faster, scalable technology built to handle surging demand and digital threats

- By AVISHEK G. DASTIDAR

FOR YEARS, THE TICKETING INTERFACE OF THE INDIAN RAILWAYS has drawn persistent complaints, often accused of being slow, bugs-infested and unreliable. So much so that the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), which powers e-ticketing through its website, regularly finds itself on the defensive in the court of social media. “At peak hour of ticket booking, say 8 am, it’s pure luck if the booking request goes through at first attempt,” says Avik Banerjee, a Kolkata-based medical representative who travels frequently by train within West Bengal. “The queues at the counters are slow, the server is sometimes down, and by the time it restarts, confirmed tickets are sold out.” This is a familiar pain point for anyone who has ever tried booking a railway ticket in India. That, at last, is about to change.

At an estimated cost of Rs 1,000 crore, the Railways is overhauling its Passenger Reservation System (PRS) and upgrading the digital backbone of a network that serves around 23 million passengers daily. Once the new system goes live, travellers will be able to book a ticket without losing out to bots (see box Old vs New). The new architecture will handle five times the current booking capacity, and also be harder to exploit and easier to upgrade. Railway officials describe the PRS overhaul as the first significant step towards eliminating waiting lists. But that remains a longer-term goal, dependent as much on adding capacity as on software. “It is in an advanced stage,” says a top official at the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS). “We are currently testing it. It will go live between April and June.”