View source for Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC)

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=Highlights=
[http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31808&articlexml=Behind-the-scenes-of-Indias-biggest-e-commerce-31012016010058 ''The Times of India''], Jan 31 2016

Kim Arora

[[File: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) statistics, 2014-15.jpg| Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) statistics, 2014-15; Graphic courtesy: [http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31808&articlexml=Behind-the-scenes-of-Indias-biggest-e-commerce-31012016010058 ''The Times of India''], Jan 31 2016|frame|500px]] 

'''Behind the scenes of India's biggest e-commerce player (and it's not Flipkart)'''

With 21 lakh hits a day and a turnover of over Rs 1,000 crore, IRCTC is among the country's biggest e-commerce players. Sunday Times takes an inside look at how the overloaded system stays on track
Tucked away at one end of a road in central Delhi, you are likely to miss the innocu ous building that houses Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) that runs the overloaded online railway reservation system. It is frequently the butt of many jokes and viral memes about those heart-breaking session timeouts during booking and exasperatingly slow speeds.
Inside the quiet office, techies are silently tapping away at keyboards but the placid surface hides some remarkably frenzied activity. These men and women keep afloat a system that has about 21 lakh daily hits and 3,000 enquiries a second at peak hours. In 201415, the IRCTC website saw over 18.3 crore tickets being booked from its eticketing portal. Starting mid-Feb, they will limit bookings to six per month per e-commerce players by revenue as filed with the Registrar of Companies. Eticketing constitutes 55% of total reserved tickets on Indian Railways.

IRCTC’s total income for the financial year 2014-15 stood at Rs. 1,141 crore.

This is inclusive of service charge for online ticket booking, sales of packaged water, Rail Neer, and license fees from catering vendors. In the same fiscal, the total amount earned from users in ticket fares stood at Rs 20,620 crore.

Flipkart India, meanwhile filed a revenue of Rs 9,351.7 crore in March 2015 with the Registrar of Companies — less than half of IRCTC in that period.

It was a busy 2015 for IRCTC. It introduced a mobile app that currently sees about 2.5 lakh logins a day. It also introduced the option of digital wallets for payments. Currently available in Hindi and English, IRCTC plans to make the website available in Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, and Urdu this year. Also on the anvil is the introduction of payment aggregators. Two years ago, responding to widespread criticism of its chaotic systems and limited capacity, IRCTC revamped its e-ticketing tech, naming it NGeT (next generation e-ticketing) system.

Last summer, the website added five more servers to its passenger reservation system layer, taking the number up to 11. “Now the site can handle three lakh concurrent user connections,” says Sunil Kumar, group general manager for IT at the IRCTC. Traffic, however, still remains a problem. Particularly during the Tatkal booking window.

The Tatkal booking sessions see the heaviest demand, straining the servers to their limit. These emergency tickets have two-tight-hour-long booking windows, of which the first ten minutes each are the most painful points of the day for the staff. “It is just these 20 minutes which are the most hectic during the day. Otherwise, the website runs smoothly,” says Kumar.

Here is what life is like on the reservation floor during those 20 minutes.

“Tatkal means tatkal. No calls, no breaks, everyone on their seats,” says Amit Kumar, an IT manager at the Delhi office of the IRCTC. When this reporter visited, the overwhelmed servers were facing a post-tatkal outage.

The activity logs showed bank transaction success rate dipping to a zero.

The Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) office is called for help.

It will be another 30-40 minutes before the servers are up again, they say. The message is relayed across the office.

Upstairs, at the call centre, employees let customers know of the glitch.

The organisation, says Kumar, employs about a hundred engineers to work the systems in Delhi, dealing with downtimes, traffic, and security issues.

Techies at IRCTC say they have to deal with the same bumps as the masses when they log in to book a train ticket. “Our friends think we probably know a couple of tricks about booking tickets with more ease. But we get in line like everyone else,” says Ritu Jain, a senior IT executive at the organisation. “The only difference (between customers and us) is that we don’t complain because we know the facts —there is just too much traffic.”

=Revenues, profits=
==2017-19==
[[File: IRCTC’s Revenues, profits, 2017-19.jpg|IRCTC’s Revenues, profits, 2017-19 <br/> From: [https://epaper.timesgroup.com/Olive/ODN/TimesOfIndia/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=TOIDEL%2F2019%2F08%2F23&entity=Ar02505&sk=3B17A00D&mode=text  August 23, 2019: ''The Times of India'']|frame|500px]]

'''See graphic''':

'' IRCTC’s Revenues, profits, 2017-19 ''

=See also=
[[Railways: India]]

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