Booking railway tickets from the IRCTC website is rarely a happy experience for passengers. They must have been somewhat relieved when Pawan Kumar Bansal in his railway budget speech promised to reform the ticketing system. It was for the first time in recent years that a railway minister focused on this matter. [See section 27 and 28 of the speech in the PDF file attached below.]

Governance Now had flagged this matter in January on the website and in the 1-15 February issue of the magazine. Here is an excerpt from what Jai Mrug, a rail and transport expert, had written as part of his critique of Bansal’s January 9 move to hike rail fares.

[Read the full story here]

[Read Jai Mrug’s commentary on the railway budget here]

The aam admi perspective
I consider myself aam — not because of any fetish for any specific fruit but because I don’t pay touts to book my tickets, I used to book them lawfully over the counter and now do it through the IRCTC website. And, yes, I still often travel sleeper class; or should I say cattle class?

Over the last decade, Indian Railways has increased passenger tariff surreptitiously by about 13 percent through a variety of surcharges, levies, superfast categorisations, and the unscientific application of the “tatkal quota” regime. And well into this decade they have been voracious, by hiking the tatkal quota allocation to a huge 30 percent. I believe scientific thinking necessarily is the basis of reform. Mr Railway Minister needs to tell us which scientific survey told him that 30 percent of passengers book their tickets only in the last 24 hours — for the uninitiated, this is the window the railways provides for a tatkal booking and you are charged a hefty premium for it.

And since 30 percent tickets are reserved for tatkal there is a 0.3 percent or even higher probability that you will end up in the tatkal queue.

Those planning a long travel, our non-reformist gut tells us, would do so between two months to two weeks in advance. Those actually waiting for the last 24 hours, given India’s legacy of the economics of scarcities, should be around 5 percent, and no more. Mr Bansal should then tell us why a huge 30 percent of the travelers are being forced to cough up the tatkal premium. Was that not a substantial and an unfair fare hike already imposed on the commuter, Mr Minister? And then you say there has been no fare hike in the last many years!

Like NREGS, this is Indian Railways’ TREGS (Touts Re-Employment Guarantee Scheme) — helping the tribe that had become dispossessed with the dawn of technology. The artificially created scarcity, thanks to the huge tatkal quota allocation, generates a mad rush for reserved ticketing even in off-peak months.

Besides helping the railways officially overcharge customers, it has created a play area for touts. Talk of employment guarantee by the UPA!

The beneficiaries of this new employment have now taken this process to its logical conclusion. With 25 percent bookings, and increasingly more, going to the railways’ website, the internet-based reservation was serious competition to touts. But the reinvigorated touts have allegedly colluded with those who maintain servers of IRCTC (the website that officially books tickets for you) and have ensured that the site books virtually no tickets till almost all tatkal tickets are sold.

Even if you manage to log in, you could end up with several snags: the new pages not loading, service being unavailable, or, in the end, a deformed page as shown below which will not let you transact —even if you transact, your bank transaction may not conclude for a long time.

Reforms: only for govt, not for aam admi?
Mr Bansal, why don’t you think of some reform at this end of the value chain? Or did you think reform is only to fill up government coffers and not for the aam admi?

Should ‘reform’ not involve a basic audit of the end of your value chain, where customers pay you money, Mr Bansal? You just cried that you were not earning enough money from them; you just said passenger growth was not on expected lines. Here is a bucket load from a class that pays you a premium for booking on the website — for the uninitiated, Indian Railways is the only transport company on earth that charges you a premium for booking through their portal — almost all others give you a discount.

Let’s have some reform here, Mr Bansal. Can we have an external auditor publish the server performance statistics of www.irctc.co.in? And why it virtually carries out no bookings between 10 am and 11 am? Why, just eight months ago, it was possible to book tatkal tickets on the website. So what has changed so drastically in the last eight months that the website has become virtually non-functional between 10 am and 11 am — a time when nearly 30 percent of your tickets get sold?

Did someone repeatedly say better passenger service for higher fares?

Significantly, the New Delhi Consumer Forum had recently ordered IRCTC to compensate Rs 5,000 to a waitlisted passenger who complained that his waitlist status had been tampered to affect his final availing of a confirmed birth. Such, Mr Minister, is the credibility of the systems that seek to thrust reform on their customers!

With most people in the reservation queue from 8 am to 10 am paying much more to the touts than they pay the railways, can this revenue not be formalised in some way? Lalu Prasad had formalised the informal freight revenue by simply legalising the enhanced freight carrying capacity. If the number of intermediaries was reduced, including the booking clerks, and a part of the grey premium is formalised, the overall revenue accruals for railways could be enhanced while actually reducing the burden on the passenger.

Any takers for this reform?