Booking train tickets has become very easy ever since IRCTC website has been introduced. Simply Register on IRCTC website by providing your Email and password. Login to your IRCTC website by simply providing your Email ID and password. IRCTC Login brings you the ease in checking out Train Schedules, Seat/Berth Availablity and PNR status without annoying popups.

How IRCTC Login Works?

Login to IRCTC Website helps to find the Bearth/Seat availability and trains between different station and Train schedule. Website won't allow you to login from multiple systems or different system. IRCTC Website completely build with responsive Ajax calls and hence there will be no page refresh, hence better user experience. Website helps to keep track of your travel expences by showing your Booking history.Even if you want to cancel your train ticket, you need not run to railway reservation counter. You can simply Cancel it online by logging into your IRCTC account. If your train already departed or chart has been prepared you can file TDR to cancel you ticket. You can also keep track of your PNR Status

India occupies 2.2% of the total land on earth. You might be tempted to think that it must possess around 2.2% of the total population on earth too. If you do so, you are making a mistake. India’s population, as compared to the total earth’s population, is not 2.2%, not 3%, and not even 10%. It is a whopping 17.07%! This means that the population here is overcrowded by 7.75 times. In other words, India is overcrowded by 775%!

Therefore there is no wonder why traffic jams, scarcity of houses, and madding crowds in public transports are an everyday business. Add to this the negligence of government authorities, travelling to a new city by train can be a horrible experience.

In this article we will take a look at the current situation of Indian Railways’ ticketing services. Our main focus would be the online ticketing facilities provided by Indian Railways and to what extent do they help the travellers.

History of IRCTC

Date of inception and intended tasks - IRCTC or Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation was incorporated on 27th September, 1999 but it was not until 3rd of August, 2002 that the operations began completely. It was established to carry out catering, tourism, and online ticketing operations of railways.

Some new policies were introduced in 2010 according to which the then Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee transferred the catering services offered by IRCTC to Indian Railways. Even after this transfer IRCTC remains responsible for catering services in some trains like All Duranto Express, Frakkha Express, Maitree Express Train between India and Bangladesh, Kandhari Express and some Rajdhani Express trains.

Also, the catering services offered by IRCTC are not limited to railways alone.

Other catering services besides railways’ catering - In an interview with the Financial Express, Virender Singh, group general manager of IRCTC’s west zone said:

“Other than managing onboard catering services and static catering units on the Indian Railways network, it [IRCTC] has also set-up multi-cuisine food courts, food plazas, food stalls, automatic vending machine kiosks, and budget hotels et al on a pan-India basis. It has more than 1,500 specialized hospitality professionals and a widespread network across India. IRCTC is connecting India in more than one way.”

Below is a photograph of the inauguration of the air-conditioned cafeteria in Lucknow’s Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, taken from IRCTC’s Facebook page.

Statistics and usage- On its first day, IRCTC managed to book only 27 tickets. Today it has 2.5 crore registered members and it generates 35% of the total revenue for Indian Railways.

Some reports suggest that currently IRCTC holds 58 servers and recently added 10 more so the total number is 68 servers. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who log in every day only 1,500 to 2,000 people manage to get tickets per minute.

On March 1, 2013 IRCTC was reported to have broken its own record of booking largest number of tickets per day. IRCTC had the record of booking 4.96 lakh tickets on July 7, 2012. But on March 1, 2013 the website was used to book 5.02 lakh tickets, according to a report in The Indian Express.

The report went on to say that the system is being upgraded with more powerful Hexa Core servers (with 64GB RAM) from the earlier Dual Core servers (with 8GB RAM), which is costing nearly Rs. 4 crore.

With this investment/upgradation, the railway officials are hoping to achieve around 40-45 per cent increase in the booking during the tatkal hours. At present, the IRCTC website books around 48 per cent of the total reserved tickets on the Indian Railways network.

Login and ticket booking problems of IRCTC

There is no doubt that the IRCTC’s website provides great value to the passengers but that does not imply that it is free from its defects.

Poor website design - First of all, as you can see from the screenshot above, the design is poor and cluttered and looks unprofessional. It has three ads running on its home page, all clustered around here and there. And these are banner ads not text ads. Text ads usually occupy lesser space but banner ads are annoying. In few cases the ads may help by supplementing the website’s information and pointing people to more useful resources but as you can see, the third lower right ad is about a UPS which has nothing to do with train tickets.

In order to book a ticket you must register yourself an account first. This is how their form looks like:

As you can see the form is very long and cluttered and might even confuse the less tech-savvy people. There is no Help and Support page or FAQs section to where you can look up for help in case you don’t understand something. In fact there is not even any official online forum where people could discuss their grievances and help each other.

Even after you have registered on the site you will encounter slow browsing speeds and sometimes the site can even go down due to heavy load.

Poor functionality and slow load time - While researching for this article I went to the IRCTC website to check it out.

I have a registered account there but since I haven’t logged in since long I had forgotten my password. I entered my email ID and requested for password recovery. I had to wait for around 60 seconds before a message popped up saying this ID is not registered. (Yes, actually I remembered then that I had registered via a different ID.)

Just for a trail then I decided to fill in the form for sign up.

After entering the pin code I got the message – “Searching for pincode 226016. Please wait…” (See the screenshot below.) And I had to wait again for about 60 whole seconds before the screen was updated.

And as if this was not enough, after I entered all details correctly and hit “Submit” I again had to wait for quite a few minutes and then instead of getting my registration confirmed I got the following error message.

The page gives three reasons why my session had expired but in actuality I had done nothing of them; except for the third one i.e. keeping the browser window idle for a long time. But what else I could have done when the page was loading?

I tried to go back to the sign up page but now everything that I had entered had vanished. I had to start afresh. Ahh…

Only 2,000 tickets per minute - Let’s talk about booking of tickets now. I’ve said earlier that the current booking rate is only around 2,000 tickets per minute.

According to a senior official, as quoted in The Times of India:

"The most common complaint we received from users was that the website hanged due to traffic overload and by the time one would log in all tickets were sold. Those seeking tatkal tickets were worst-affected.”

The report speaks about the fact that the government is planning to introduce a new technology by the end of this year, a technology that will be able to handle 120,000 simultaneous users at any point against the current capacity of 40,000.

According to another report in The Times of India the government is planning to increase it to 7,200 tickets per minute.

But the report also mentioned that the task will cost around Rs.10 crore to accomplish as they will need to buy the necessary hardware and it will take at least three months before the speed is upgraded.

This upgradation is necessary considering the heavy load on the servers at 10 a.m. when the booking for tatkal opens.

PNR status and how to check it?

Spend some time on the Indian Railways’ site and you will find the term PNR cropping up again and again. Many people use this term without even knowing its full form.

PNR stands for Passenger Name Record and hence PNR number means Passenger Name Record number. It is a ten digit number uniquely assigned to every ticket purchaser which he can use for later reference. The most important task that PNR number performs is helping the passenger in finding the status of availability of his seat.

Which of the two you think is simpler in checking the availability of your seat? Entering the travel date, the seat number, the train number, the departure time, the name of the train, or simply entering a ten digit number which is automatically configured with all such details?

So you see the PNR number makes life easier for both the officials of the railways and the passengers.

There are three ways by which you can check your seat’s availability status or PNR status.

1) Through website – The official website of the Indian Railways www.indianrail.gov offers the facility to check the PNR status for free. You just have to enter the ten digit number and hit “Get Status” and the latest status of your seat will be delivered to you. In fact there are some other websites too which provide this service for free. One example is www.pnrstatus.co.in.

2) Through SMS– This service allows you to check your PNR status by just sending a text message. Type in “PNR <10 digit PNR number>” and then send it to 139. Although the officials claim that you will receive an instant text reply informing you about the status of reservation, berth, and coach number but my practical experience has been that it takes at least a few minutes. This service costs only Re. 1.

3) Through phone call– The number is just the same – 139, but now instead of texting you will have to call on this number. Then you will be required to punch in your 10 digit number and you will hear a voice informing you about your current status.

IRCTC’s customer support and ways to contact them

Contact details- There are a number of ways through which IRCTC can be contacted. First let me put down all their contact details:

Customer care number - 011 39340000

Fax number - 011-23345400

For railway tickets booked through IRCTC:

I-tickets/e-tickets: care@irctc.co.in

For cancellation of e-tickets: etickets@irctc.co.in

Registered office / Corporate office :

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd.,
9th Floor, Bank of Baroda Building,
16, Parliament Street, New Delhi 110001.
Tel: 011-23311263/23311264
Fax: 011-23311259

IRCTC’s official Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Irctc-Official-Page/153063811427168

Having said that, I must warn you that IRCTC is infamous for its terrible customer support services.

What the passengers are saying - Here are some of the messages people have posted on their Facebook page:

“I can fairly see the plight of Indian Railways and the money it has digested in the name of modernization it has gone through. This is the most pathetic services of all. I'm falling short of words. Pathetic. How can you even exist? I'm never going to open IRCTC’s website again in my life. It has been a horrible nightmare. Hopeless and helpless.”

“Your website is super pathetic. You guys are such a disgrace to the nation, I have been trying to book a tatkal ticket for the last three days and still was not able to. Are you all about opening cafeteria and food joints? Stop making fool of the citizens of the country.”

“Most hopeless site on this planet.”

“It is better to sleep on the railway platform for two or three nights to get your tatkal reservation done early next morning rather than using IRCTC's booking website. It’s impossible to open the website between 10 a.m. - 10: 30 a.m. which is the tatkal booking period. It’s like a third degree torture where the hardest, meanest, and toughest of the criminals will crack under pressure.”

All of the above messages were unanswered by the page owner. If you think they failed to receive a reply because of the rudeness of content then you are mistaken because the other messages which were quite humble and respectful also received no response. Here is an example:

“Dear Sir/Ma’am,

I am getting a problem while logging with my user name and password, the error displays - ‘invalid user ID or password’.

My user ID and password are correct but still I am facing this problem, also when I click on ‘Forgot password’ and answer my security question then also it displays the message – ‘Cannot change your password.’

Need help. Please sort out this problem and if there is any solution please give a reply.

Thank you.”

This message was posted on 28th May but as of writing of this article it was still waiting for a reply.

In fact I scanned through many other old posts and I couldn’t find a single one which had received an official reply.

In the end I would say that although IRCTC is a useful service but it could have served the passengers in a far better way if they would have focused more upon the design and running of their website and less on opening new cafeterias and canteens in different parts of the country.

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