If any of you woke up this morning to book train tickets for Diwali for a vacation back home, this blog might be catharsis. You logged in to irctc.co.in at 8 am to book your tickets – not for anything but lack of choice – and waited till 8.30 am to see the face of the 'plan my travel' page, only to realise that all tickets have been booked and your favourite train is showing the status as 'RWL', or regret wait list.

There goes Diwali vacations out the window!

Half an hour into the day’s operations and more than 600 tickets gone! And to imagine it’s still 60 days to go for Diwali.

While you mop for the loss of a cheap way to travel home and contemplate on alternate methods, you realise a 'new feature' on the portal that you click, only to realise that irctc.co.in now sells everything – from clothes to shoes to bags to what have you. So now it is not just a public sector undertaking for Indian Railway ticketing, it is now a full-fledged e-commerce portal in association with yebhi.com.

I wonder what the idea is, really. Is it to make you buy some shoes and indulge in some retail therapy while you get irritated at the already slow site's slowness? Or is it that we suck at railway reservations anyway, so you know, umm, just selling some bags to make up for it?

This new section might be wishful thinking by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC). A result of the wrong analysis of what the numbers tell. According to data, irctc.co.in is indeed the most visited 'e-commerce' website in India. With more than 5 lakh visitors every day, it has no competitors. All that’s fine but while the numbers do talk about the success, they do not explain that this is because the domain of online railway ticketing in India is a monopoly.

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This lack of qualitative analysis may be the reason why irctc.co.in has jumped into e-commerce without first putting its online ticketing house in order. There are reports that the site will become faster in November as the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) and IRCTC are planning on both software and hardware upgrade to make the ticketing experience better and faster. While only time will tell what or how the upgrade will be, we want to know that for a website which blames the number of visitors for the slow performance, should IRCTC have added another feature that would increase the number of visitors and also engaged them for longer?

Also, why would someone, anyone, come to IRCTC to buy shoes or bags when there are already enough – and better – places selling them to people?
Why can't IRCTC just sell train tickets, and sell them well, instead of ‘creating’ a shortage every day? And if it is ungrateful enough to eat into other's share of the e-commerce pie, then could it also cease being the sole railway ticket provider?