The Railways is mulling a shift in tatkal booking timings to start at 10 a.m. instead of the present 8 a.m.

The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is seeking the Railway Board's approval for the move. IRCTC hopes that this move will help ease the morning traffic on its website when both regular and tatkal bookings are made. e-Ticket agents have blamed the morning web-hits as being responsible for the website crashes. The government has now banned them from booking tatkal tickets online from 8- 9 a.m. after complaints from customers saying that the agents are cornering tickets in large volumes and causing the crashes.

IRCTC officials insist that changing the timings will greatly reduce the pressure on the server as the web-traffic will be more evenly distributed with regular bookings thinning by the time tatkal bookings start.

"The Railways is trying to get an estimate of the number of tatkal hits a day. It'll then be easy for us to segregate the bookings into tatkal and advance," says a senior IRCTC official.

However, the move seems to be an attempt to redirect attention from the need to improve its network capacity. Shifting tatkal timings may or may not ease the pressure on the server depending on the volume of hits for such bookings. The authorities, in their need for an urgent solution, have also assumed that the volume of advance booking would have thinned by 10 a.m.