

The State Of Railway e-Ticketing In India - mindprince
http://mindprince.blogspot.com/2011/10/state-of-railway-e-ticketing-in-india.html

======
todsul
I just spent 6 months in India, which included a 12,000km circumnavigation of
the country by rail. A team of 20 of us, half rail enthusiasts, half
travellers and entrepreneurs, spent 2 weeks on Indian trains venturing to the
country's most Western, Northern, Eastern and Southern points (in that order).
We travelled a little in unreserved and Sleeper class, but mostly 3AC and 2AC.
It was by far my favourite travel experience ever (after travelling
extensively across 6 continents).

The Indian rail and ticketing systems are chaos personified. As a traveller
post-India, I love the adventure of just trying to buy a ticket from a
station. (Quick tip: stand wide, shoulders broad, with ticket form in hand
blocking access to the hole in the ticketing window so others can't push
through.) But, thinking back as an Indian-rail newbie, my goodness!

As an entrepreneur on a trip like this (full of industry experts), I couldn't
help but see business opportunities. When I say experts, I mean guys that can
recite the Indian rail timetable (approx. the size of the Yellow Pages)
without missing a beat. They're also the guys that dominate the popular India
rail forum called IndiaMike.com. The depth of their knowledge was staggering.
When someone like me meets people like them, we can't help but plot and
conspire.

From a business perspective, the problem with building an Indian Rail startup
was getting access to the rail information. We had grand plans and certainly
the expertise, but then came the stories of bureaucracy. Forget publicly
accessible APIs, the IRCTC would apparently only give access through bribes. A
couple of people I spoke with talked of requests for US$40k. (Dinner and
expensive champagne is one thing, but $40k is on another planet.)

So why compete with Cleartrip, et al? Well, they're just not intuitive or
efficient. They're actually a pain in the ass. We envisaged something like
Hipmunk for Indian train travel. But rather than being satisfied with just
better design, we saw an opportunity to bring Indian rail travel to the
average foreign traveller. Of course, the last thing the Indian rail system
needs is more passengers, but it felt such a shame that most people would
never experience India the way we did.

In the end there were just too many hurdles. For starters, you can't book
foreign tourist allocated seats over the internet (despite bribes and access
to APIs). You can't even book them at most stations. Then there are issues
with IndRail passes and availability. You can book tickets 90 days out, but
the volume of ticket sales in India is mind-blowing. If someone wants to
travel cross-country next month, sometimes they'll buy 5 different days and
just cancel the 4 extra as they get closer to the day. The cancellation fee is
so low that it makes sense. So in a country with 1.1 billion people, imagine
people booking multiple tickets to provide flexibility. This is why there's
such an insane last minute frenzy.

I still think there's an opportunity here, but the data needs to be made
accessible. In my opinion, this kind of openness requires structural and
cultural change in government. I hate to say it, but don't hold your breath.

All of that said, I highly recommend travel by Indian rail to anyone. We were
a mixed group of Brits, Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc and were
treated more warmly than anywhere on the planet. Of course there were a couple
of "incidents" (e.g. breast groping), but hanging out the door a speeding
Indian locomotive in the middle of nowhere is something everyone should
experience.

If you're a foreigner wanting to book Indian train tickets with minimum fuss,
I've written a detailed guide here: <http://globetrooper.com/notes/plan-book-
train-trip-india/>

------
statictype
No rant on the Indian Railway system is complete without mentioning the
disaster that is the 'Thatkal' quota booking at 8 in the morning.

Years ago when I was one of the few people among friends and family that had
good internet and a credit card, I used to book a lot of tickets for others.
Out of frustration, I wrote a simple python script that automated the process
of booking tickets at 8 in the morning.

It would log you in, fill in the passenger details, payment mode etc.. and
boot you into a browser for the final bank transaction screen. It was fast
because it wouldn't actually wait to download the html screens before
submitting the data. It would scrape the main page's date and sync itself with
it to submit the booking exactly at 8am. I was able to finish a booking in
less than 30sec.

After spending a few days prodding their system to make this hack work, I
learned just what a mess their backend was.

They have a form variable called 'clickCount' which they increment and pass
around on every page. This is how they 'detect' that you clicked a link twice
and helpfully log you out.

Their validation and actual processing of passenger genders is case-
insensitive - they accept either 'M' or 'm'. However the final ticket printout
you get will show all passengers as female unless the gender you sent in was
in upper case (curiously though the actual official print out pasted on the
train when travelling contains correct genders - I have no idea why).

I presume many people had similar scripts to what I had and so eventually in
an attempt to circumvent it, they introduced captchas. Turns out the captchas
didn't actually work.

I know this because my script continued to work for a long time and only a few
months after they introduced captchas (when I visited the website the normal
way to make a booking) did I even know they introduced it. I can only presume
that if you didn't actually submit the 'captcha' form variable then they
didn't bother to validate it. So the irony was that the people booking tickets
the normal way suffered while the rest of us working around the system were
rewarded.

Finally they realized this at some point and threw in the towel and just
banned quick booking altogether from 8-9 because they couldn't figure out any
other way to actually solve this problem. So yeah, I'm probably part of the
reason that happened (though by no means the only one who did this type of
hackery,I'm sure).

~~~
whoahey
I believe the captcha was introduced because travel agents were using VB based
software to automatically book tickets at 8 am using IRCTC.

For the life of me I don't get why IRCTC doesn't use some good load balancing
and improve performance of their mainframe.

~~~
rottenapple87
For one, they are not IT majors in webspace, they are a travel firm. For a
company like Indian railways, they have more important things to do like the
safety of trains and ensure better travel experience than just concentrate on
making the online user experience better.

~~~
Indyan
FYI the website is not developed and maintained by Indian Railways. It's
outsourced to an IT services provider. As far as I recall, TCS, which is an IT
Major, currently has the contract. All the Indian Railways needs to do is have
a couple of competent people, who can supervise the project to ensure quality.

~~~
adisesha
I don't know if TCS still have contract but this company is
<http://www.broadvision.com/en/customers_aeroxchange.php> part of it. When I
tried to get PNR status, I once got this error,

javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: No bean found for attribute key historyDetails
and rest of the stack trace. From stacktrace, they are using struts and
broadvision's some customized servlet container, most likely tomcat.

------
harichinnan
The whole point of having such a weird system is to make it "difficult" for
you to book a ticket. Think about the "common man" standing in a queue for 4-8
hrs trying to book that ticket when you could ideally book using your coolest
newest gadget in seconds. Now that would cause a riot at the railway station
booth. In Indian you never have enough resources available for the 1.3 billion
people. So everything is rationed, including the online train tickets. It's
like the IIT's or IIM's conducting the world's toughest entrance examinations
only to select a statistically insignificant 1% of the applicants. Great
Indian politics demands badly run government services. Private services are
still banned in a number of areas including private universities, public
transportation, power, Aeronautics ....

~~~
mayanksinghal
Actually much of the sectors that you have mentioned have been deregulated:

1\. Private Universities: No. But there are tons of private institutes under
universities.

2\. Public Transport: Trains no. Buses - in most parts of the country (eg.
Madhya Pradesh)

3\. Power: Tata Power, Reliance etc. Coal mining is the part that has not been
privatized, AFAIR.

4\. Aeronautics: No, but airtravel yes. Secondly, the aeronautics industry and
research in India is still at a very nascent stage - so I am not sure if it
really hurts the economy/society.

~~~
seunosewa
Privatization is not deregulation.

------
eli
_Every day from 23:30 to 0:30 the server is down for maintenance. Seriously,
every day? Their server needs maintenance every fucking day? Which technology
are they using?_

A mainframe that does batch processing at night.

~~~
wulfric
They use OpenVMS on Alpha it seems. Look at this:
[http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/indiarr/indiarr....](http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/indiarr/indiarr.pdf)
I don't think HP is winning any customers here.

------
Indyan
The IRCTC website was frequently cited as an example of "what not to do"
during the training phase in my company.

Cleartrip on the other hand is a shining example of stuff done right. It's one
of the friendliest websites I have ever used. Don't have an account? No
problem. You can still go ahead and book a ticket, Cleartrip will drop a
gentle reminder to set your password to create an account, _after_ you have
booked your ticket. Forgot your password? Again, no problem. Cleartrip will
allow you to go ahead with the booking, and send the link to reset your
password to your email.

~~~
mayanksinghal
Wait, ClearTrip is actually pretty pathetic in terms of the UI. Try MakeMyTrip
- it is _way_ better.

~~~
Indyan
This might be just a personal preference, but I find Cleartrip's UI to be far
superior to any of its competitors. Btw, I just remembered another good
example of Cleartrip "getting it". I was trying to book a hotel. And due to
messed up internet connection it didn't go through. I think I attempted to
book the same hotel twice or thrice. This was after midnight. The very next
morning I get a call from Cleartrip enquiring if I was facing any issues with
their website, and offering to do the booking over the phone.

------
sidjha
I like how @dcurtis approached a similar problem with his open letter
containing a redesign of the horrific aa.com website:

<http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html>

I'm not sure how effective such an approach would be considering it's much
harder to get Indian organizations (especially a Government one, oh boy) to
respond to feedback of the people, but it's definitely worth a try.

As some of us know, Anna Hazare and his stellar campaign against corrupt
politicians in India is an inspiration to get Governments to act.

~~~
potatolicious
It didn't even work that well on this side of the ocean - if I recall
correctly when this redesign first hit the web HN ripped dcurtis a new one.

Without addressing the Indian trains issue at all, there's a common mistake
designers make that particularly annoys me - which is that "clean looking" is
often conflated with "usable". As much as we hate to accept it, there is a
_lot_ of data out there that indicate many _extremely_ busy looking, messy
looking websites out there work very, very well.

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yaacovtp
I survived backpacking in India using <http://www.cleartrip.com/trains> for
all train reservations.

~~~
blntechie
Seconded. There are multiple third party apps/sites which provides almost all
these functionalities. But my only gripe is that there is no public api im
aware of. You need to put in a request for aceess to train schedules/routes
and other details and i assume you need to pay for that. Or the only option
left is scrapping their site which is against TOS and illegal.

------
dsrikanth
Oh boy that reminds me of all my similar experience with IRCTC. If I need to
book a ticket for a busy weekend, I get my friends at various other locations
to try and book the same. We all stay on conference call and when one person
books it, others stop trying. Usually tickets open for booking at 8:00 am and
the server is literally dead for the next 1 hour.

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random99
Well, let's just hope that they don't do it like they did in Finland. Good
luck! 1\. [http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/domestic-
news/general/167...](http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/domestic-
news/general/16782-part-of-finnish-railways-ticketing-system-tested-in-india-
paper-.html) 2\. <http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?17,2578324>

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jrockway
Clearly the solution is to offshore the job to the US.

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hsshah
The reason is; people who can influence a change (bureaucrats, politicians,
businessmen etc) use intermediaries (agents) to get things done. They never
experience the pain of the "common" people. All government services are like
this.

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rajeshsundaram
It is so funny, that I've been unlucky with 90% of my cleartrip train ticket
bookings. No I did not mean, failure to book. But it is that, I end up
cancelling those tickets! LOL.

IMO, IRCTC UI with its "just-ok"user experience, has almost all the options
readily available. Whereas, Cleartrip does not. Cleartrip tries to keep things
simple here, but I guess it does not work good for certain areas like
Cancelling the ticket, or filing for TDR etc. Often it takes extra clicks to
refine my train searches.

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swapsmagic
It's the same experience most of the indian railway travelers have faced
(including me) and so i have put my 2 cent by creating this website which
helps travelers to track their ticket status on mobile/email. site:
<http://www.railpnrstatus.com>

I think as a HN reader you should also think in those line and give ur 2 cents
by improving the system.

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nakkali_kuere
This is the state of the English language edition, forget about the it in
local language with translator's laziness there actually no word of the local
language used instead the English is just transliterated in the local script.
It might be possible to learn English the same day and read it rather than
trying to read in the local language.

~~~
sateesh
Not sure why you are downvoted here. This is a valid point and it is true that
much of the web content/computer generated content that is available in local
language is obtained using transliteration. Also much worse is that many of
the English words are written in local language as is, where as the actual
need is to translate that word to local language and use it.

------
mmahemoff
I think Transport For London used to be more protective of its data, but
ironically budget cuts meant govt departments like TFL realised they can get
much better leverage by opening up to third-party apps. The creative power of
constraints.

------
chrisbennet
I believe it is interesting and relevant but I'd be more sympathetic to the
author if he hadn't disabled the ability to go back to HN after I read it.
WTF?

------
foobarkid
Why cant they hire ONE decent programmer who can come up with a good design !!

~~~
rottenapple87
Son, It aint easy to scale up a system like that. "ONE" programmer within a
small timescale can never achieve something as scalable as that all by
"himself". I have been using IRCTC since its inception and I see it the user
experience is constantly evolving. Let the product evolve.

~~~
foobarkid
Well.. True that ONE programmer cant scale. But we are not talking here just
about scaling. The way the current site works, I doubt if any one with a
decent programming experience is working on it. The current site is clearly
not user friendly. Takes huge efforts to book a simple ticket and if you
havent experienced being logged out constantly now and then, just cos you did
some thing wrong, I refuse to believe anyone sane is working on the other side
of the website !

------
fungi
sounds like you could hack around much of that with a firefox / chrome
extension.

------
pitdesi
The more interesting and useful thing about this rant is that companies have
come in and done something about this problem and started making money doing
so. Historically you could avoid the lines at Indian railways by using offline
travel agents who charged their commission. A few venture-backed* companies
have brought that model into the 21st century - IRCTC sucks, so they put a
pretty interface on it that doesn't suck and charge 10-20 rupees (25-50 US
cents!) extra per booking:

<http://www.cleartrip.com/trains>, <http://www.makemytrip.com/railways>,
<http://www.yatra.com/trains.html>

Solve a problem like the Indian Government (IRCTC is a government undertaking)
like this and you'll have lots of takers for 10-20 rupees. They offer a better
user interface, saved payment details, a consolidated place for air & rail
bookings and better customer support.

*Cleartrip is funded by Kleiner Perkins, Ram Sriram, and Concur. MakeMyTrip by several top asian funds, and Yatra by Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital

~~~
jezclaremurugan
But the dumb government has stopped them from providing full fledged service.
These other sites cannot book "tatkal tickets" from 8:00 - 9:00 AM, after
which there would be no useful tickets anyway. The least Indian Railways can
do is to fully deregulate. So, right now IRCTC is monopoly and that explains
why it is like it is.

~~~
tmbsundar
8-9 Tatkal booking is not allowed in irctc also.

~~~
abhishekdelta
Its not allowed only for Agents, as there have been past incidents when mass
booking is done by agents and normal customers don't get any tickets.

------
geekin
Frankly, I am shocked to see why this story is trending on HN. A college
student ranting about the biggest railways booking system ? really ?

~~~
almost
Why the hate? Its an interesting read. Thinking about and discussing awful
systems like this can help in figuribg out how to better make non-awful
systems.

And why exactly is it relavant that he is a college student?

~~~
geekin
Awful system ? yes, but a massively scaled. think about the scale of the
system. One single backend is serving kiosks at thousands of railway stations,
lakhs of booking counters and several agent terminals. True that there are
downtimes and slowness - but consider this system as a classic usecase and
study of how massive a system can be. The student who wrote this rant just
talks about the downsides and how bad the whole system is. I would appreciate
a few ideas on how he in his great might would do to fix this massive system.
Are there any constructive ideas in this article ? do we learn from this
article ? It is very easy to rant about everything...if you don't like my
views and downvote my comment, you are free to do so.

~~~
almost
Awful is still awful :) And from that description it is a truly awful system.
And saying "if your so great why don't you fix it yourself" is a really stupid
response to criticism. Why be so defensive about a bad system, YOU didn't
write it, right?

~~~
geekin
Well, its beneath me to respond to an ignorant and snide remark. I think the
level of language on HN has gone down a lot

~~~
almost
Oh come on, your originally comment was a nasty little dig at someone for
writing up their experiences and a suggestion that they don't count because
they're "just a college student". You made that comment from a new account so
you either are new here (in which case, what's with the complaining about the
discussion going down hill?) or you where not prepared to stand behind your
comment so used a throw-away account.

I have no idea why you consider the Indian internet rail booking system a
subject above criticism, it just seems bizarre.

------
rottenapple87
This post imho is attracting way too much attention than it actually deserves.
Well IRCTC is the least of the worries about Indian Railways. Well, the
technology they seem to be using is not the best around, but considering their
financial and time limitations, they are trying to put out the best they can.

Best service certainly comes at a greater cost(yes, monetarily) which the govt
is in no luxury to afford and IMHO, they certainly are trying to put out the
best they can. (Just look at the figures the internet majors spend on scaling
up and you'd understand.)

Convenience charges : You sir have to realize that because of IRCTC you need
not waste fuel, stand in huge queues etc. and thus you have to appreciate that
part and pay up the nominal amount. I think they should charge the convenience
charges at least for the next few years, may be because the employees still
have to be paid and can not be asked to quit their jobs even if you do not go
to the reservation counter.

I do accept that Indian Railways being a govt. organization as expected is
corrupt and is not efficient etc, but well its not all that bad.

~~~
foobarkid
This post is attracting way too much attention just for the simple reason that
so many people are pissed off at the service. I refuse to believe that lack of
money is the cause for all this. For all that we know, more than half of funds
are being eaten by politicians.

~~~
miraze
why are blaming "Politicians" for bad UI ...

