Rail Budget 2013: Bansal vows e-ticketing revamp; 7,200 bookings a minute

New Delhi: Raising hopes of smooth and much faster online bookings of rail tickets, railway minister P K Bansal said a new e-ticketing system will be deployed by December-end which will allow 7,200 bookings per minute against the present 2,000. “By the end of this calendar year, we will put in place a next generation e-ticketing system which will bring about a paradigm shift in internet rail ticketing… The system shall be able to support 7,200 tickets per minute as against 2,000 tickets per minute today,” Bansal said in his speech on Rail Budget for 2013-14 on Tuesday. [caption id=“attachment_640777” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screen grab from IRCTC website[/caption] The new technology is also expected to increase speed of website functions as it will support three-times more users compared to current capacity. “The new technology will support 1,20,000 simultaneous users at any point in time against the present capacity of 40,000 users with capability to easily scale up as demand increases in future,” Bansal said. The minister said that Indian Railways will start providing reservation facility through mobile phones. Besides this, a system will be soon in place to provide updates passenger on their reservation status. “As a follow up to overwhelming response to IR (Indian Railways) website and Integrated Train Enquiry Service under ‘139’, a project of SMS alerts to passengers providing updates on reservation status is being rolled out shortly,” he said. Bansal said that passengers will now be able to book ticket from midnight 12.30am to 11.30pm. PTI