Tatkal tickets availability surge as Indian Railways wipe out illegal bookings

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Passengers of Indian Railway will now get a better opportunity to avail Tatkal tickets. The number of Tatkal tickets available for passengers will be more in number as compared to previous times. In addition, the time span of the available tickets will also increase to a greater extent.

The recent improvements have taken place following the measures undertaken by Indian Railways and Railway Protection Force (RPF) to root out unlawful agents and the illegal software they used for illicit booking of such tickets.

The railways recently arrested 60 agents who were involved in using illegal software for Tatkal ticketing. Over the past few months, those agents were using illegitimate software such as ‘ANMS’, ‘Jaguar’ and ‘MAC’ to block the ticketing process. These software tools were used to infiltrate IRCTC’s booking captcha and login captcha as well as bank OTPs to generate Tatkal tickets. This made it impossible for passengers to book genuine tickets through fair means. A normal booking process usually takes around 2:55 minutes. However, the illegal software would decrease the booking time to 1:48 minutes, allowing the agents to book tickets before general registered users.

Arun Kumar, Director General, Railway Protection Force, addressed the situation in a press meet. He assured that in contrast to the previous booking timing, the cleansing process of the illegal software would ensure availability of ticket booking for general passengers for hours now. He further shared that at present, no illegal software is being used for ticket booking. He also added that all issues in the IRCTC website have been solved and all illegal software operators have been apprehended.

Many of the illegal software used for booking tickets, generated annual revenue of around 50 crore- 100 crore, all of which have been officially blocked.

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