Irctc — Substandard Online Service

Address:

Andhra Pradesh

This is in reference to the sorry state of online service provided by IRCTC where Tatkal ticket booking is nothing short of a farce in the name of mass railway booking. Being an IT professional, I understand the significance of Hardware support to an online system, and if IRCTC cannot provide hardware support to meet the demands of the traffic that it attracts, it ends up being what it is, a service that only a handful of agents reap benefits of!

For the past 7 days, I have been trying to log into this site at 8:00 AM only to get this "service unavailable" message consistently. On calling up the customer helpline, I was told that this issue is encountered as the issue is at the ISP end due to low internet speeds and not the IRCTC end. Today I tried booking tickets through a 2MBPs leased line to allay all such claims and I still encounter the age old issues... "Service unavailable" in capitals they claim!

My honest request is if they cannot sustain an online reservation system (in times of peak load... Tatkal being a prime example), they should discontinue the service (and let go of the 7:30 agent window, as they hog onto the system and stop us deserving passengers from availing their so called facilities) and let the otherwise effective queue system continue, till we have a robust corruption free (agent free) system in place!

Please, If my plea is rejected, the least I do is expect a reply to know why my request was rejected.

A dejected civilian,
Bijesh Gopalan