Some ideas to solve the online train ticket reservation issues...

Here are some ideas to get over the issue we discussed during the last post, about all train tickets getting booked during the first few minutes after its opening....

- Disallow i-Ticketing. e-Ticketing may be allowed.

- Booking through internet opens only a few days after it opens at the counter and closes sooner than at the counter. As a further refinement to this, booking at the internet opens at least 2 hours after the counters open, and closes at least 2 hours before the counters close, everyday.

- Establish a quota of tickets that may be issued for a particular journey through internet. No more than this quota will ever be available through internet, unless cancellations (of those tickets, that are booked online) happen in between. This may be further broken-down to limit the number of bookings/day through internet – on the basis of time (per hour/day), or place (from each zone, district etc) or from an IP.

- Fees (say, Rs.100/-) for registering account with IRCTC. Fees payable only through banks (as done during the final stage of booking)

- Similar to the 4 bookings per month restriction, there should be a restriction on the payment too, and that put in place with the help of the banks. Bank shouldn’t accept more than a fixed number of debits/month from a certain account towards booking charges and registration fees.

- To restrict un-manned computers from automating the booking process, insist on manual entries like ‘Enter the following characters as you see on screen’.

- Insist on details like DL, passport, ration card, electoral identification, PAN card or similar, while the online booking is processed. Optionally, have a process to validate these or at least have simple validations like number of digits and characters in passport number etc. Don’t allow multiple accounts with same details.

- Insist that the same documents (quoted during the time of booking) be produced while boarding the train or during cancellation of the booking. Disallow any such black-marked accounts (or even the individuals concerned) from booking tickets online again.

- Have a middle man/agency to process the data and perform verification of data provided during account creation and booking, apart from the automatic verification under each of the above bullet items.

- Automatic logout from session after 10 minutes.

There could be many more, but if all or some of the above are implemented rightly, I'm pretty sure, the rest of the solution will find its own way...