The idea was good. It was to ensure that people in even the remotest areas of India got the benefits of the online railway ticketing system. Enter the ticketing agent who was supposed to book tickets on behalf of those who did not either have the wherewithal or the know-how to book.

There are two kinds of agents with Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC): Individual agents or Rail Travel Service Agent (RTSA) and organisations or Principal Agents (PA). The PAs, currently 100 in number, employ sub-agents. Both PAs and RTSAs sign a contract with IRCTC valid for a period of one year (previously two years). It can be renewed after payment of a renewal fee. Agents are paid Rs 10 for every second class and sleeper ticket and Rs 20 for every AC III and II tier tickets and for First AC tickets.

The agents, however, are not exactly a happy lot. They allege that IRCTC indulges in monopolistic practices, like imposing arbitrary penalties and renewal charges. In the case of e-Suvidha of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, its contract with IRCTC for two years was activated only after a delay of three months. There was no compensation for the delay.

Mohan Thakur, State Coordinator for e-Suvidha, told Governance Now getting refunds from IRCTC against cancellation of tickets has been the biggest problem. It is an issue that’s been faced by another agency in Karnataka. Both agents have discontinued their contract. “The refunds never came on time. As a result our sub-agents either had to ask customers to come multiple times or had to pay from their own pockets,” said Thakur.

There are other issues that have cropped as a result of IRCTC’s revised rules of 2011. The rules state that in case a sub-agent is found guilty of possessing personal or multiple identities, the principal agent would be fined or penalised and the accounts deactivated. The fine for possessing multiple ids is Rs 20,000 per sub-agent followed by penal action and deactivation of account if the behaviour continues. Srei Sahaj Private limited, which facilitates the setting up of common services centres (CSCs) in rural areas, signed up for being a principal agent for 5001 sub-agents in June 2008 for a period of two years.

The non-refundable deposit for the required number of agents was Rs 20 lakh. The officials of the company claim that despite repeated requests only 3,300 agent ids were provided by IRCTC.

The contract was renewed thrice, each time with penalty for sub-agents possessing multiple ids. “First of all this penalty was not part of the original agreement as the penalty clauses were announced in 2011 while the contract was signed in June 2008 and renewed in 2010. Second, there was no way for us to know if the agents had a private id or not,” said Nilay Raha, Assistant Manager, Emerging Markets, Srei Sahaj. “IRCTC has a provision to block ids which provide similar phone numbers, names and email ids which was not implemented in this case,” he added.

IRCTC claims sub-agents are the responsibility of PAs. IRCTC said sub-agents with multiple ids can be identified with the help of a decoy test. “All you have to do is visit the agent as a customer for tatkal booking between 10 to 12 AM, a period during which agents are not allowed to book. If he is able to do so, then he is using his personal id,” said an IRCTC official, who did not want to be named.

IRCTC Chief Managing Director (CMD) Rakesh Tandon refutes all allegations. “The responsibility of the sub-agents always rested with the Principal Agents. Why else would they become Principal Agents otherwise? We have made strict laws to check unlawful activity of the agents. The ground level responsibility always lay with the principal agent,” said Tandon. He added that the behaviour of the sub-agents could make or mar the reputation of IRCTC. “We keep on improving the rules according to complaints received from the consumers who are most important to us,” said Tandon. As IRCTC's reputation rested on the behaviour of the sub-agents, a check on their conduct was of utmost importance. “We keep on improvising the rules according to complaints received from the consumers who are most important to us,” said Tandon.

But the agents are not satisfied. The Karnataka-based agency, which did not want to be identified, said that IRCTC came out with fresh clauses during renewal that the agents had no option but to agree to if they wanted to continue their ticketing services. E-Suvidha’s, renewal took seven months. “We decided to end the service as our experience was not very good with it,” said Thakur.

When Sahaj’s contract came up for renewal for the third time, by which time it had already paid 140,000 as penalties for possession of private ids with sub-agents, the IRCTC abruptly asked it to pay Rs 25 lakh as renewal fee. “There was no mention of such a fee anywhere in the original agreement and was a completely arbitrary move by them,” said Raha.

Tandon counters Raha and claims that IRCTC did not ask for any money arbitrarily. “We always have an amendment clause in the contract which give us the freedom to put fresh clauses as and when necessary. We understand that the prices were low when we started in 2006-07. We were looking at proliferation then. They have increased now according to the times,” he said. Tandon, however, agreed that there have been issues with agent contracts over a period of time which he claimed are in a ‘process of being resolved through dialogue and deliberations’. “We have now come up with draft guidelines which have been sent to the agents for their comments. We will create a final policy based on these comments and hopefully all agent issues will be resolved then,” said Tandon.

"We will create a final policy based on these comments and hopefully all agent issues will be resolved then,” said Tandon.

The draft policy, among other things, has mentioned that Principal Agents who want to use CSCs for online Railway ticket booking, will not be charged any initiation or renewal fee if they arrange a tripartite agreement between themselves, Department of IT (of the Centre or State) and the IRCTC. This move comes at a time when the government is taking all necessary steps to make CSCs viable by provisioning more services to them. In a bid to start on a clean slate, IRCTC has said it will renew all discontinued contracts on the payment of revised renewal fee.

Online railway ticketing is a big market with around 500,000 tickets, approximately 11.5 lakh berths, being booked daily. IRCTC is the only player in the market, making it a de-facto monopoly. The service levels provided by IRCTC have always been a bone of contention. One online IT forum puts the daily debate on IRCTC’s service quality in perspective: “Facebook and Google handle far more traffic than irctc.co.in, but you never see them crashing.”

Yet this negative perception of its service quality does not seem to have deterred IRCTC from entering into the retail e-commerce space. The website now also sells products such as shoes, bags and home furnishings. While the Facebook versus IRCTC debate might be a little too far-fetched, considering that IRCTC is a transaction website with complicated payment gateway systems embedded in it, the criticism about the inadequate capacity of its servers is not far off the mark. Admitting that initial server capacity of 35,000 concurrent connections provided for IRCTC was low, M Srinivas, Additional General Manager (IT/SW), said, “Today the server capacity is almost unlimited and more is going to be added.”

There is also a problem with the bandwidth. For a website that gets close to 400,000 hits a minute and 2.5 crore hits per hour at the peak time of 10-11 am every morning, the bandwidth provided is only 450 Mbps. Such a small amount of bandwidth cannot sustain website with 25 lakh visitors every day. “We need at least a bandwidth of 1 GB for proper functioning of the site,” said Srinivas. IRCTC’s monopoly status also seems to be a reason for its slow response to customer feedback. “If air tickets can be bought through five different methods and can be booked in five minutes flat, why not rail tickets?” wondered an aggrieved customer.

Agents hope that the new draft guidelines will bring in transparency and consistency in the ticketing policy, while users might expect better service by November 2013 with when the revamped hardware and software will kick in completely. But such measures might be a balm to soothe frayed nerves rather than the cure.

Agents and experts believe that Indian Railways should directly deal with different kinds of agents rather than route them through IRCTC. Such a step, say experts, would decentralise the service making it faster and more competitive, while empowering the customers with choice “We would want a single independent terminal to Railway ticketing. It would solve a lot of problems,” said Thakur. “We do not want to be agents of IRCTC as our service becomes completely dependent on their performance,” said the Karnataka agency.