IRCTC News & Updates

[moindear]

I guess we are happy to pay and avoid those long queues at the reservation counters.
Hope someone comes with proper policy on this.
I think its only possible if BJP comes in power with 250+seats. Never possible if Congress is in power.

 

[mhsabir]

I will partially agree about more players = more competition, not fully. It is valid when there are many empty "seats" available, and the players fight out to give max. discount possible without making a loss to make sure "their" seats are sold. Here all seats will be sold for sure, if at all they might fight to give you the lowest black market price, which in any case would be inflated over the regular price

 

[mhsabir]

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/irctc-fined-rs-10-lakh-for-selling-soft-drinks-above-mrp/375422-3.html

[color=rgb(60,61,61);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;]Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has been slapped with a fine of Rs 10 lakh by a consumer forum here for selling soft drinks above the maximum retail price (MRP) to two customers. The New Delhi District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum imposed "punitive compensation" of Rs 5 lakh each in two separate cases against IRCTC, a subsidiary of Indian Railways, and said being a government corporation, "it is not expected to be deficient in such matters and cannot come down to level of private dealers".[/color]

[color=rgb(60,61,61);font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;]The two complainants had alleged that a retail outlet of IRCTC had sold each of them a bottle of Maaza having MRP of Rs 12 for Rs 15. IRCTC, which handles the catering, tourism and online ticketing operations of the railways, was proceeded against ex-parte as no one appeared on its behalf.[/color]

 

[chintha_bmbs]

thats a great news, more cases to be filed against private dealers also..

 

[Jignesh]

Good, most of them sell above the MRP and when asked why is that so, they give lame excuses.

 

[Sushubh]

This is weird. I am pretty sure that the courts allowed for a higher price based on value addition. Which would be cooling the soft drink before it is served.

 

[hno3]

There are other players in the market like Cleartrip, makemytrip and yatra. They access the cris network and database using webservices specifically given to them so they can bypass the entire irctc framework. The problem was that they created such a user friendly ui which allowed user to send multiple requests to server to find train availability and multiple connections from same user in different tabs. This way they managed to book lot of tickets during tatkal booking while the irctc timed out user requests. Railway authoruties took note of this and banned them from booking tatkal tickets for two hrs after tatkal booking starts. To reduce the number of connection requests at 10 am irctc decided to allow only one connection per computer so multiple tabs and browsers wont work. To go even further they do not allow more than one irctc id per mobile number. Also the user accounts of websites using webservices have to be linked to a irctc id in order to book a ticket. Despite implementing these measures irctc failed miserably last summer.Even if they manage to get such huge volume of users to login they cannot solve the root problem which is the demand supply gap. Tickets will get booked within minutes of opening tatkal booking. If only the state govts dont get greedy and reduce the taxes on airline fuels then airlines can compete with the higher classes of railway and reduce the demand from railway. Last summer I couldn't get delhi mumbai rajdhani ticket I went to an agent at nizamuddin station and he said the black market rate was 4300 rupees for this train. A dedicated guy would sit sleep at the counter with your photo id proof signed by you so that he is allowed to book the ticket on ur behalf. The cost was too much for me so i refused. Anyway the point is that if ppl are willing to pay 5k for train then can easliy for for a 5k airline economy ticket but airlines were charging 12k then. Airlines have to make hay when the sun shines because they have to recover the money for flying all the empty seats for rest of they year thanks to high taxes on fuel.

 

[Sushubh]

IR needs to privatize all consumer facing services on their network. They should just focus on running trains. Charge huge sum of money for everything. Stop being involved in anything that you cannot handle on your own.
I mean the government is milking private operators for contracts for roads, flyovers and everything!

 

[ashish]

Even the new IRCTC site is supposed to come by year end. with delays it can very well roll over to next year

 

[iCon]

@hno airline will never be a competitor or option for railway, you simply can not have a landing strip in all city across the country, secondly in summer people book ac birth even for 300km journey. Only way exist to cope up with the Indian crowds is to put more trains with less intervals with more compartments. Heard that railway has 7-8 servers, they need few more and greater powerful servers and some strict policy but again strict policy is a dream in our country.