Indian Railways Is Upgrading Its Reservation System To Handle 1.5 Lakh Bookings A Minute

Indian Railways has started shifting trains, in phases, to a new Passenger Reservation System, or PRS. The move replaces technology that's been in place since 2010 and is meant to fix the slowdowns travellers hit during the Tatkal booking rush.

"Layer by layer matching of the new user-friendly look and feel will involve a slow and steady load-based testing as we migrate from the old to the new PRS," Dharmendra Tewari, Additional Director General of Public Relations at the Railway Board, told Indian Express. He confirmed the newly launched IRCTC beta website is part of this transition.

What Is PRS?

PRS is the system behind every reserved train ticket in India. It handles seat allocation, waitlists, RAC, reservation charts, and passenger enquiries, along with booking, modification, and cancellation of tickets. It's built and maintained by the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), which was itself established in 1986.

• Introduced in 1986, PRS replaced manual reservation registers and counter booking with an electronic setup.
• Through the 1990s, it expanded across railway zones into an interconnected network. It let passengers book a ticket for any train, from any connected reservation centre, regardless of that train's origin or destination.
• Internet-based booking followed in 2002, taking reservations beyond physical counters for the first time.
• In 2014, the Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) system pushed online booking capacity and performance further.
• In 2025, the RailOne app launched, and the government announced work on this next-generation PRS.
• August 2026 marks the start of the phased migration.

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Why It's Changing Now

Photo: Canva

The current PRS can process about 32,000 ticket bookings per minute. That capacity struggles during high-demand periods, especially tatkal. The new, cloud-enabled PRS is built to handle over 1.5 lakh bookings per minute and more than 40 lakh enquiries per minute, up from 4 lakh currently. It will also carry a multilingual, user-friendly interface and is designed for greater scalability and reliability as demand keeps growing.

Some passenger-facing updates are already in effect, ahead of the full system migration:

• Advance Reservation Period cut from 120 days to 60 days, to better match how people actually book
• Aadhaar-authenticated tatkal booking, introduced July 2025, for fairness and transparency
• OTP verification added on top to curb bots and unauthorised agents

The IRCTC website also has a new beta version, launched July 2026, with a simplified interface, fewer booking steps, and seat availability shown across all classes. It will eventually be integrated with the new PRS. Beyond ticketing, IRCTC also runs a tourism platform covering hotel bookings, retiring rooms, lounge bookings, tour packages, flights, and bus tickets.

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The Scale Involved

Between June 2025 and June 2026, passengers booked 65.08 crore reserved tickets through PRS. 89%, or 57.90 crore of those, were booked online. Around 20.5 lakh passengers use the system daily across multiple booking channels, and 73% of transactions are cashless. That makes PRS one of the largest public-facing online platforms in the country.

The rollout is happening train by train, not all at once. Through the coming months, expect a changed look on IRCTC and gradually faster performance during rush booking windows as more trains move onto the new PRS.