I am planning to travel to my native in November and I had to book a rail ticket. I don’t have enough time to spend in endless queues at various Indian Rail reservation counters and so I decided to use IRCTC (http://irctc.co.in) to book my tickets online at my home on broadband internet. I was aware that it was a big risk. I had to prepare a lot to do the successful booking at IRCTC. Tickets for the desired day starts getting booked 60 days in advance (that is today) at 8:00 AM and I was fully prepared. I got up early today and first logged in to net and checked whether everything is fine. I was able to login to IRCTC and it was very fast to use. I was confident that at 8 AM I will surely book my tickets in Rajdhani express.
Booking at IRCTC for festival season tickets is risky, unreliable and Herculean task.
At 7:55 AM I again started a fresh session at IRCTC and logged in. I prepared my query and got ready with all details. At 8 AM I pressed the OK button at IRCTC website and was shocked to see a blank page with "Service unavailable" message displayed. I kept trying many times. I tried with Internet Explorer, I tried with Mozilla firefox. Mostly it was not proceeding a single step after getting logged in to IRCTC website but Sometime I was able to proceed one or two step ahead and then it was displaying "Service unavailable" message or was hanging. I started getting frustrated. I was sure if I cannot book in next 15 minutes or so I cannot get a confirmed status railways reservation. I didn’t loose my heart and kept trying. Till 8:30, I might have logged in and logged out to IRCTC at least 100 times and somehow I could never proceed because of all the different kind of error displayed by IRCTC website. Looked like the server of IRCTC got unresponsive and got chocked due to heavy load at opening time. At 8:30 AM suddenly I could go one more step ahead and I saw status that the tickets are "NOT AVAILABLE". I lost the opportunity to book Rajdhani Express tickets on desired day. This is not the first time I had seen this happening.
All the services provided by Indian Railways are pathetic. Whether it’s catering, seating, security or even ticket booking. Indian Railways NOW claims they are in profit. They should utilize people's money to improve the services instead of going to all business schools to showcase there skills to convert a loss budget in profit budget and patting their own back.
Anyway I have changed my planned departure date and postponed my journey by one day and will be trying my luck at long quesues at Railway reservation counters at 5 or 6 AM tomorrow. Hopefully I will get a ticket.
I (and tens of thousands of railways passengers) usually remember these four lines and try thier luck every day with Indian Railways:
MAN MEIN HAI VISHWAS
PURA HAI VISHWAS
HUM HONGE KAMYAB EK DIN............. !
