IRCTC record: 5.8 lakh etickets sold in a day

One measure that IRCTC took in achieving this target was to launch a new website called ‘IRCTC Lite’ for premium tatkal ticket booking between 10 to 12 in the morning. The corporation removed all the links, images, ads, services, features from the website that didn’t directly help a user in booking a ticket, and minimised the load that server had to bear in opening a page. This freed up some bandwidth allowing more users to get on the same page. Kundu said “crores of rupees and a slew of measures” had been invested to improve the experience of those wishing to book a ticket online.
“This paid dividend in the form of increased number of booking during the Tatkal period. In the first hour of Tatkal booking (10am-11am), the earlier average booking before the introduction of the “IRCTC Lite” was around 48,000 tickets, which has now jumped to more than 58,000,” said Kundu.

He said that the officials working on the website were working to achieve the target of having more than 7,000 tickets booked through the website every minute from its present around 2,000 tickets. “Once ready the website would be able to handle 1.2 lakh users at any point of time as compared to its existing capacity of 40,000 users. IRCTC has already started working on this augmentation and is investing a large sum of money to install future generation hardware, develop improved software with tworking facility and new data centre,” added Kundu.