Railways' e-ticketing upgrade in the works

The Centre is working to upgrade the online passenger ticket booking system of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to ensure that it can handle more demand.
This information was shared in the action taken by the government on the observations or recommendations contained in the eighth report of the standing committee on railways on the passenger reservation system of Indian Railways.

The railways ministry said it has taken several steps from time to time to modernise the ticketing process.

"The Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) system has been upgraded constantly to handle increased load of 15,000 tickets per minute in 2016-17, 18,000 tickets per minute in 2017-18 and 20,000 tickets per minute in 2018-19," said the railways ministry. "Presently, IRCTC website has a capacity of booking over 25,000 tickets per minute. A record number of 26,458 tickets were booked in a minute on March 5, 2020."

The surge in ticket booking on March 5, 2020 is believed to have occurred on account of last-minute books ahead of Holi that year.