IRCTC revamps website to lure more users

BANGALORE, INDIA: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd (IRCTC), which also provides online passenger reservation system, has launched a beta version of the revamped site, which is claimed to be more user-friendly and efficient.

The beta version of the new site is available at https://www.irctc.co.in/cgi-bin/beta.dll/irctc/services/home.do#

The new interface is intended to increase the number of visitors who book rail tickets using the site, said Subir Agrawal, director - Consulting, BroadVision - Asia Pacific Region. BroadVision is looking after the website.

“We observed that out of the total number of visitors to the IRCTC only 45 per cent book tickets. Our aim is to increase this number of visitors by making the process more interactive and easy,” he said.

One of the new steps taken is instant booking; the travellers need not login/register for the booking. Anyone can book tickets.

The team is using Web 2.0 platforms and Ajax for enabling more features in the site. The new site would have drop-down options and provide more information on the same web page.

“One need not put a separate request for the train, seats, availability and fare. The intelligent enquiry software would help getting the required information from a single request to central server and that in return bring down the load on the servers,” added Agrawal.

Apart from this, the department would have more powerful servers to take up the loads especially during the peak hours of booking season and timings.

One of the biggest challenges for BroadVision is server loads, which freezes the systems for minutes during booking the tickets especially at 8 am.

According to Subir Agrawal, the number of bookings on an average had been increasing multifold compared to the servers/infrastructure. These bookings and enquiry request are 6-7 times higher during the peak hours than the rest of the day. So while the existing infrastructure is well equipped to handle the daylong traffic, it is the peak hour traffic that clogs servers.

He shared that the average number of booking done in a day is around 3 lakh in comparison to a thousand booking done some years ago. According to him, new-age technologies like virtualization are already being tested, but even they have their limitation.

“The best suit would be if we could get more 40-50 servers just for the peak hours to share the load, but none of the systems integrators today provide such facility on rent or any other ways.”

Also three key elements come into play while booking — Central Reservation System (CRS) maintained by Indian Railways, the transaction gateway (maintained by respective banks) and finally the provider of web applications, (BroadVision).

“The three need to collaborate together to get the best solution forward. IRCTC statistics suggest that in a month the success rate on transaction for bookings done by credit cards is around 72-75 per cent, while in case of net banking/debit card, it is around 67-70 per cent,” he added.

IRCTC is the most crowded website in the country. And given the ever-increasing penetration of Internet in cities and villages alike, IRCTC would see more and more eyeballs on the website. Though it claims to update the back-end technology in every two-three years, its problem does not seem to end, bringing in more responsibility on the web enabler like BroadVision