New Railway Ticketing Portal – IndianRailways.Gov.In

IRCTC – Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation through its internet ticket booking website irctc.co.in, sold 7.20 Crore tickets with total value of 6000 Crore Rupees, amounting to net income of 11.2 Crore for the Railway Financial year 2009-2010.

It is certainly IRTC E-Ticket booking highlight. What about low lights ? surely, most of regular travelers like me agree with below list

• IRCTC.CO.IN is a Overloaded website, mainly in searching, planning & ticketing features, it take hell out of time to go from one page to another.
• Unacceptable Transaction Failures, 2 out of 10 payment gateway returns fail, worst part because of time-outs. It’s almost impossible to book tickets from 8 to 9 in the morning.
• It’s a very Average looking website , with at-least 5 steps navigation required to book one single ticket. There is quick-book, but not for average user. IRCTC should have employed at-least one good UX expert to improve IRCTC website UI.
• Missing Shopping Cart, Journey Planner is available only for a single trip. A return ticket means double the service fees charged from Credit Card and upto Rs. 20/- from IRCTC for every trip ticket. It would have been helpful to start standard shopping cart based ticket purchase, like any other web based commercial site. User should able to plan all his trips, and book and pay at once. Avoids multiple transaction failures, avoid unnecessary service fee/taxes.
• No automated or systematic alerts from IRTC for changes in schedule, seat availability, waiting update, etc.

Well the good news is that, Indian Railways has initiated brand new E-Ticketing service through http://indianrailways.gov.in/. Another good thing is domains under gov.in are hosted in secure zones. India’s country TLD – .IN domain IRCTC.IN is not owned by IRCTC, but confuses with IR real domain IRCTC.CO.IN. Top level domain IRCTC.COM is used for corporate services, routes to IRCTC.CO.IN for ticketing.

Is its good change or not ? Before creating and logging into http://indianrailways.gov.in/ in e-ticket account, my expectations built four-fold. I thought all low lights in IRTC will be overcome. But I’m disappointed again, IR (Indian Railways) website is in pathetic condition than IRTC website. UI and website is poorly designed, looks like under graduate summer project. It was hastily inaugurated by ex-railway minster. Cheap taste to inaugurate half-baked things to public from a top most government function.

If I accept that first version will get matured in time, with experience yes it will, what left is what is value add it planned to bring in ?. Its paperless tickets yes!!! you heard it right, PAPERLESS TICKET. Ticket will be sent to your phone via non-transferable SMS, you can travel with an ID proof. That’s nice, book online, IR will send ticket on SMS, travel without paper printout. Super, is it similar to Bahn DB Tickets on Cellphone in Germany ? I’m not sure, but shall result similar. German DB Bahn employs MMS with QR encoded Ticket, Ticket Officer scans this QR from travelers mobile phone screen with his QR reader, verifies against a photo identity proof. Life is so simple in German trains. But the catch here is Bahn DB employs MMS and in-turn need GPRS connection. Indian Railways is employing SMS to avoid it. Its little early to guess how IR will end up implementing this, there is nothing called as non-transferable in 3GPP specification for SMS. Native SMS application on end users cannot be changed. But to use a mechanism, which can decode IR SMS is possible via Mobile Edition Java based applications and these can be downloadable on recent feature and smart phones. Otherwise routing any SMS is easy and one can find number of applications which can run on Laptop or handheld devices. My guess is IR will send encrypted SMS to custom IR application that can downloaded from IR website.

As IR now mandates both mobile phone and email is required to be verified before using IR service, verification of user ticket can be done by replying SMS from user registered mobile to Ticket Officer’s Special-Mobile on board. The reply path (mobile number) can be automatically set to Ticket Officer’s Special-Mobile. Here still one issue is non-local travelers without roaming feature enabled. Lets leave this to IR engineers to figure out, but one good take-away is, there are few people in IR who can think beyond paper tickets. It’s truly a welcome feature.

IR should also think of removing “Service Charge” levied, this should part of their standard ticket price. IR providing E-Ticket solution through internet will help themselves in reducing long queues, managing ticket counters and increase accountability (remember how TCs can manipulate seats).

I wish, both IRCTC and IR should come up with good service and can compete in healthy manner, at end of day, its beneficial for all railway users.

If you have not already got an idea, how German Train (Bahn) Company DB implemented it’s truly awesome website, look at here bahn.de and cellphone ticket info here .