File photo: The logo of Indian Railways
The e-ticketing website of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation or IRCTC booked more than five lakh tickets on August 12, the highest-ever tickets booked in a single day.
"There has been a record booking of 5.04 lakh e-tickets yesterday," said a senior IRCTC official.
IRCTC, a subsidiary of railways, has invested about Rs 11 crore to strengthen and upgrade its ticketing website for facilitating booking of more tickets.
Earlier on March 1, the website had booked 5.02 lakh tickets.
The average daily booking was around 3.85 lakhs last year, which has now become 4.30 lakhs per day.
IRCTC has also taken a slew of measures for smooth running of its system like blocking agents during the initial two hours of booking - from 8 am to 10 am - and Tatkal ticket booking from 10 am to 12 noon respectively.
This was done to prevent illegal booking of tickets through automated software by touts to help individual customers buy tickets during the said two hours, which draws the maximum rush.
IRCTC is revamping its site by increasing the booking rate to 7,200 tickets per minute from its existing capacity of around 2,000 tickets and also augmenting the capacity to handle 1.2 lakh users at any point of time as compared to its existing 40,000 users.