Getting Tatkal tickets on IRCTC would no longer be a tough fight this summer. Here’s why

The morning hour scramble for booking Tatkal tickets will now considerably ease as IRCTC has upgraded its website by introducing two high-capacity servers that have doubled peak-time efficiency.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation’s (IRCTC) portal installed two Linux-enabled servers recently. This will be raising the booking capacity to over 14,000 tickets per minute from the existing 7,200, much to the relief of passengers jostling for tatkal reservation, which faces heavy rush in its first 15 minutes since 10 am when the service opens every day.

The capacity augmentation has been done as an “immediate step” to cater to the summer-time demand for tatkal tickets and a forenoon flurry in their online reservation, revealed IRCTC Chairman and Managing Director Dr A K Manocha.

“The positive results are already showing,” he pointed out. “The measure is vital, considering that 54% train tickets in the country are booked through IRCTC website.” The average daily sale of train tickets through the portal, which is the world’s second busiest with 3 crore registered users, is around 5.5 to 6 lakh. It has registered a record 14,800 tickets per minute.

IRCTC, which is a 16-year-old ‘mini Ratna’ PSU of Indian Railways, had introduced e-ticketing in 2002 through its digital platform. The website was first upgraded in end-April last year, facilitating 1,50,000 concurrent connections (users at a time) and the ability to entertain 1,000 enquiries per second.

“Even that was later found insufficient, given the summer-time rush for tatkal tickets—especially in premium trains plying between the most sought-after destinations,” said the CMD of the 1999-founded IRCTC, which is also into railway food catering and tourism promotion.

“The two HP Itanium servers have now helped raise the capacity of concurrent connections to 3,00,000, while the facility for enquiries has trebled to 3,000 per minute. Logging in on the IRCTC’s website has become smoother and more efficient. ”

With the addition of two new servers, IRCTC has now 17 servers while the existing 1.4 GB bandwidth has increased by 25 %.

The tatkal reservations on all Indian trains total roughly to 4,00,000 tickets (around 2.5 lakh PNRs). Of these, 50,000 tickets are slotted ‘critical’, given their high demand owing to various reasons during a given season.

On April 1 this year, when advance reservation period was made 120 days, IRCTC improved its national record by enabling booking of 13,45,000 tickets.

(Image: Flickr)