The IRCTC Saga - "Unplan My Travel"

“Indian Railway” – The lifeline of India. The most rugged and the most popular public transport that is used by millions “Daily”. Needless to say it is one of the most trusted and one of the biggest brands that India possesses, thanks to the British for leaving this prized possession with India. 

Belonging to a middle class family I also revere Indian Railways. I love to travel by train just because it gives you true experience at best price.

But one acronym that makes me change my tune about the Indian Railway services is IRCTC. Irctc.co.in, the website which facilitates you to get railway tickets online is one of the most pathetically managed services I ever came across. 

Reasons???

• Today having many services just a click away made the life simpler and of course LAZY, being one of the lazy & so called tech savvy I prefer to get most of the things done online. The UI, looks & other visual aspects of Irctc look perfect, but when it comes to book tickets that too in ‘TATKAL’ the whole thing goes haywire.

• One can book online tickets 3 month before the journey date but it is really hard to plan your journey 3 months before, so it happens rarely. When it comes to 2 months, plans start taking the shape.1 month before you make a firm plan and think to book the ticket. So 1 month to go and you start checking the tickets of a train, in my case long distance (24hrs) journey & there is nothing to your amazement you knew that you will end up booking a sensible waitlist ticket (upper waitlist) with a never ending hope that it will get cleared i.e. ‘the hope’ that hundred of Indians have for the same thing at the same time.

The Climax –   

72 hours remaining for your train to leave its source station and tatkal window opens 48 hrs before the train departs from its source station, so still you have 23hrs 59minutes of hope left of getting your waitlist cleared or to touch RAC atleast. But god just wants you to be a better experience holder and enjoy your so called IRCTC experience and never learn from it. Thus your so called booked upper waitlist ticket remains static, it acts as it is Dharamendar and Gabbar has tied it in shackles & it will only allowed to move when you being the Hema malini start saying ‘nahinnnn meri ticket ko chod do’ so in the end you have to show your dancing skills i.e hitting the cancellation button. 

Next day you get up early by 7:45am without even brushing your teeth & visiting your sanctum (the loo) you start your lappy with a ‘fresh hope’. You login 10 minutes before and keep refreshing the same page till it ticks 8:00am. As it ticks 8:00 the awesome page of Irctc you were seeing a few minutes before with lot of enthusiasm shows you “the page cannot be displayed” or “service unavailable”.

But nope being a Indian psyche you never lose hope so you keep refreshing it again & again and the website also loves to play with you sometime even it takes you to the stage of orgasm i.e. till the payment gateway and then never returns you back. So in that case your money is gone time is gone.

But no, hum kahan manene walon main se hain ji so you will not give it up you will give a try again, its already 8:15 and if you are one of the strike lucky you will have 2-3 tickets left but here is the twist, it may happen that the time you will get your payment done you will be pasted with a tatkal waitlist ticket on your face which is more dangerous than having any ticket. So you try your luck & if lucky enough then everything goes well which happens ‘Rarely’, atleast not with me. In the end you have nothing in your hand and your previous waitlist ticket has already sworn of not moving from its place thus you have to cancel it 24 hours before to make the person behind you happy and finally you atleast achieved some sense of pride ‘wow’.

So what did I learn from all this hassle?

Truly, nothing much. As plans are bound to change, sometime they are just sudden and sometime ambiguous till last date. So even if I have a flight ticket two months earlier I am just taking a risk and postponing the same is dearer than getting a tatkal ticket through a railway agent.

Now I have left with few options which are;

• Whether to postpone my traveling plan. 
•  To get in touch with a railway agent and end up paying him more than double the amount of actual ticket. 
• To be there at the physical ticketing counter line from very early morning onwards (3-4am) to get the ticket (even then guys of agent will be 3-4 number ahead of you in line because they use to sleep there whole night, so again risky) 
• Or if I know some BigShot in railway then get in touch with him (not in my case)

So you rely on the agent if your travel is urgent but again they also don’t take 100% responsibility of getting your ticket done and asks for just any hefty figures/numbers come to their mindless money mind.

So what is the whole point? 

The whole point is to urge Indian railway to get the things in place, to get the hassle free service available to every Indian out there as this is not only my story rather of many. 

• The railway minister should reduce or fix the agent quota i.e. they should give only certain amount of licenses in every city only to few trusted agents that too only for online booking which must be only 30% of total tatkal seats available. 
• The government should give some relief to common man who is not tech savvy and who still relies on getting the ticket done on physical counter where the non licensed agents made ticket booking as monkey business. By regular checks and making the counters available only to common man, by checking his/her identity at the time of booking (i.e whose and for whom he is booking the tickets) to curb illegal ways.

Thus all an uncommon mangoman wants is “Uncorrupted” service and comfort of mind as well as travel.