Internet Booking. Review on Indian Railways

Most of the issues related to Indian Railways have been taken up, quite ably by the other reviewers. I am writing a small reveiw about my experience with the Internet booking system of the Indian Railways.

A month back, I wanted to book a railway ticket from Nagpur to Delhi, and therefore I decided to try out the Internet booking system. After having registered at the site, I filled in the required information and pressed the submit button, which to my surprise resulted in "nothing" at all. Thinking that this is a problem of my internet connection, I emptied the cache, rebooted, checked the net connection on a couple of other sites, and tried again, with the same results. The next day, I tried booking through an internet cafe - and - again nothing. I then had to book the ticket at the railway station itself.

Having checked with a number of people, I now know that the railway internet reservation system is quite erratic, and doesn't work a number of times. I do realize that an internet transaction site has problems from time to time, but the railways booking system is problamatic much more often. If they are thiking of offering excuses like the "large number of visits and transactions" etc., Amazon and ebay have even higher traffics, and they are not even "the world's largest employer".

Additionally the railway reservation site is not operation in the evenings, and night time (IST). There is no reason why it should not be on. Or is the internet too, part of the railway employee's union. Actually the railway employees are even working in the night time, the internet seems to be a union member with special off-time rights. :-)

I do understand the need of the Indian Railways to gather financial resources, but pasting the website with cheap looking, flashy, bandwidth hogging, and plain annoying advertisements is certainly not the way. They can take a leaf out of Google's book and go for a few targetted text based advertisements, or they can put just one plain advertsiement, and charge for the exclusiveness.

I do hope that Indian Railways makes the internet booking round the clock, and enhances the backoffice software to get rid of continuous problems. Only then will the Internet booking system function as a true boon, and not an only too occasional bane. I am giving it an average rating, and poor quality. Maybe the quality of service is better than many other government (or even private) services in India, but in comparision to even the most basic transaction websites, it is quite poor.

Note:

Actually the "Staff Courtesy" section does not apply, but as it is mandetory, I am giving it the same points as the "Quality of service" section, taking the annoying ads in consideration. :-)