Indian railway booking: An example of how middlemen are drawn into a bad system

IRCTC homepage, image courtesy: irctcloginpage.in

I dread today's project of booking a tatkal (quota that opens 1 day prior to journey date) railway ticket. I must go through the only site available, www.irctc.co.in.

Firstly, registering oneself on IRCTC, is fairly easy, as long as you have an Indian cell phone, to which an activation code will be sent. If you are a foreign tourist (or even an NRI) looking to make reservations, you are going to start hating India.

 Once you are in, the flow is linear, up until the reservation confirmation screen. You begin with a search for relevant trains, and then availability. Then, you pick the train and type out the traveler names on yet another page. You then choose a payment option. Only Indian credit/debit cards are accepted. A major problem with this page is that once you have chosen a payment option, you have no way of going back to select another for any reason. You are required to start over. And the serial flow itself works this way, no chance of going back at any point. And of course, at each stage, you can be forced to start over ("Service Unavailable"). This doesn't always happen, but will happen several times to you during tatkal booking when the traffic is very high. A very frustrating user experience that the global IT superpower that is India seems unable to make better in any way.

Because this process is so frustrating even for a fairly sophisticated computer user, middlemen inevitably crop up. And crop up they have in huge numbers, making an entire industry out of booking electronic tickets. To qualify 'sophisticated computer user' further, I've found that you have better chance of making a reservation (especially tatkal) if you have more than one browser open and attempting log in using separate IRCTC accounts (mine and another family member's usually). My average turn around time for a solitary tatkal ticket is about 1 hour.

Cases of rogue IRCTC agents (and sometimes Railway employees) abusing the site and the system have already come and gone. Either way, the system being what it is, is definitely prone to middlemen thriving and attempting to game the system.

Just making the site user friendly (can't the government hire a user experience firm?) and decently fail-safe at high traffic times, will take a lot of the need for middlemen out of the picture. It is not the wait time that frustrates most, although that is not an insurmountable problem either. Each time I go through a tatkal booking process, I end up thinking I should start getting these done through an agent. I'm sure others think that way too..

Until a few months ago (or has it been over a year?), sites such as makemytrip.com and cleartrip.com used to allow railways bookings (even tatkal) through their site. Now, these sites are practically useless for railway bookings. The entire IRCTC registration process is required, and a Cleartrip account, for example, will only link your account to the IRCTC account. The Railways has now made IRCTC the only stop for tatkal tickets, and the IRCTC site is fairly stable during non-tatkal (peak) hours. So, why would anyone go to the trouble of doing the entire linking process within Cleartrip? This is a nice example of how IRCTC could not build a fool-proof booking platform that would allow the likes of Cleartrip to take advantage of. IRCTC, instead, has chosen to be the monopoly booking site, all driven by an anti-fraud team and not a user experience team.

Another major middleman-creator is the lack of regional language interfaces on the IRCTC site. Does the government expect all ticket bookers to know English? Can a good Tamil-language or Hindi-language interface not be built? 

It is good that there are many private service centres (like STD booths) that allow/assist people to book railway tickets via the IRCTC site. These don't qualify as middlemen, for, where will people without a computer or easy access to a railway booking office go? It is making the system and the site/platform user friendly, while not compromising on security, that is a no-brainer, but the ministry will not do anything about it.

What irks is that IRCTC electronic booking is supposed to be a fairly simple system. More complicated systems involve people-to-people interactions and several stages, for example, the RTOs that handle driver licenses.