Reacting to criticism over e-ticket glitches, the Indian Rail Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) said that it has taken a number of steps to upgrade its IT infrastructure.

Last month, K H Muniayyapa, minister of state for railways, had assured that several technological innovations are regularly undertaken to upgrade its online services. These include an increase in server bandwidth to augment e-ticketing systems.

Both the IRCTC and the Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) are working jointly to double the web site's capacity from the current four lakh bookings a day to eight lakh a day. In recent past, a number of steps have been taken, including installation of high capacity database servers, and increasing the internet bandwidth from 344Mbps to 450Mbps as per a report in TOI.

IRCTC has also deactivated thousands of the multiple user IDs and individual user IDs of agents, who would jam the systems, causing servers to hang during peak hours.

An IRTC official said, "The problem of failed transactions is also because of the system issues of banks with whom we have tied up. Ideally, a transaction should get completed in two minutes but on some payment gateways, the time taken is more than this, resulting in failed transactions."

The corporation, on its part, said it is working on a payment system that will reduce transaction failures. It is also trying to lessen the burden on their website by roping in other travel portals for faster bookings.

Change in Tatkal booking timings, too, has helped decongest traffic during peak hours. The opening timings of booking advance reservation period (ARP) and Tatkal tickets have been segregated to 8am and 10am, respectively. Agents have been barred from booking ARP or Tatkal tickets during the initial two hours after booking starts.

As a result, the official said, "The number of online bookings has increased from 3.5 lakh per day to more than 4.5 lakh, which shows that the measures taken by IRCTC have yielded results." The vigil maintained by the anti-fraud IT and vigilance team on bookings has also eased the situation after suspicious bookings were cancelled or investigated at their behest.

Earlier, approximately 35 lakh transactions in June 2012 and almost 37 lakh attempts in May 2012 had failed due to the huge rush to book railway tickets online. To top it, there were several cases where a ticket was not generated, and yet the transaction amount got debited from the card.

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