Infotech Lead Asia: Indian Railway’s IRCTC is set to invest about Rs 100 crore to strengthen its e-ticketing site.
The large scale investment is aimed at bridging the gap between demand and supply in e-ticketing category.
The new investment plan enables IRCTC to book 7,200 e-tickets per minute in the current fiscal from the present capacity of about 2000 tickets per minute.
Currently, the ticketing site of the IRCTC is able to handle about 1.2 lakh concurrent connections on web servers, according to a PTI report.
CRIS, the technical arm of railways, is involved in the upgrading of the IRCTC website.
The upgrading of website is a continuous process as an average booking per day has been increased from 3.67 lakh in 2012 to 4.15 lakh now.
There are about 31 crore reserve tickets being booked in a year out of which 55 per cent tickets are sold through windows. While 37 per cent tickets are booked online, eight per cent are being booked by ticketing agents.
Tendering process for upgrading of software and strengthening of hardware is on as per the Rail Budget announcement.
Former Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal had announced in his Rail Budget 2013-14 that the booking capacity will be enhanced to 7200 tickets per minute with the development of next generation software for the e-ticketing site.
Generally there is a huge load on the website at 10 AM, when booking of Tatkal tickets opens. The booking of ticket varies from time to time based on festival and vacations.
