IRCTC ticket booking system upgrade: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) plans to upgrade its ticket booking system to reduce website disruptions during peak hours and improve the online booking experience. The proposed improvements aim to strengthen system stability, manage heavy traffic and enable smoother train ticket bookings.

Nearly 89 per cent of reserved train tickets in are now booked online. Between June 2025 and June 2026, passengers booked 65.08 crore reserved tickets through the PRS, of which 57.90 crore tickets were booked online.

During peak booking hours, such as the 8 am opening of Advance Reservation Period (ARP) and Tatkal booking (at 10 am for AC class and 11 am for non-AC class), heavy traffic has sometimes caused disruptions on the IRCTC website. To reduce such problems, IRCTC is working to upgrade its Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGET) system, which was launched in 2014 to improve online ticket booking capacity and the passenger experience.

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IRCTC to upgrade NGET system

In a statement, IRCTC said it is working on two major upgrades to improve its website and app. The first is an NGET infrastructure upgrade, which includes improving servers, storage, networking and software.

“There are two things we are trying to introduce. One is the NGET Infra Refresh. NGET is Next Generation e-Ticketing, which is the platform for the IRCTC. We are trying to upgrade its hardware by the storage, the servers, and the networking, plus the software. So we will increase. Like you have seen, we have reached around 37,000 tickets per minute. This may increase to more than 1 lakh and all. This has been done with PRF modernization…around INR 150 crores has been infused into it,” it said.

The second is an active-active disaster recovery system, aimed at keeping services running if one system faces an outage. According to IRCTC, this is important during peak booking periods, when even a one-or two-minute disruption can affect passengers.

“We are trying to go for an active-active disaster recovery, because sometimes if the website is down, then the passengers will have to face, and we are very much behind that 1 minute or 2 minute. This become the golden hour for us. If we will have a disaster recovery, most probably coming up at Secunderabad,” it added.

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IRCTC beta version

Launched on July 15, the IRCTC beta website has introduced four major improvements to make ticket booking easier and faster, including fewer unnecessary CAPTCHAs and pop-ups, seat availability across all classes, fewer steps during checkout, and the option to save passenger details for quicker repeat bookings.

“Since we have seen that our website is getting transformed, the beta version was launched on 15th July. With a new UX/UI interface, the beta version has been launched, which doesn’t have any advertisements, no captcha, no pop-ups,” it said adding that IRCTC is working to launch the full version of the redesigned website very soon.

IRCTC tightens checks to tackle unauthorised agent activity

IRCTC said it has strengthened its systems to prevent unauthorised and suspicious users from clogging the website during peak booking hours, particularly at 8 am, 10 am and 11 am. The company is also using Akamai for bot mitigation and content delivery to manage website traffic.

“We have built a regimen other than employing Akamai, who does the bot mitigation and CDN delivery, content delivery network, by offloading the static content, and other agencies who try to ensure that these scurries do not come in. We have built a regimen in which the time limit has increased from 15 minutes of non-usage of this website by the agents to now 30 minutes,” IRCTC said.