Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) booked record 5.02 lakh e-tickets in a single day on 1 March 2013, outshining the earlier one-day sales record of 4.96 lakh bookings last year.
It is important to note that while the current facilities available for IRCTC e-ticketing is not technically sound and equipped enough (to handle the huge number of applications), the record achieved here is of huge importance. On 7 July 2012 the Corporation had booked 4.96 e-tickets as per reports.
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Yet, IRCTC has recently taken great measures to improve the website so as to increase its efficacy. The Corporation has invested around Rs 6.5 crore in enhancing the efficiency of the website. With this investment around 40-45 per cent increase in the booking during the Tatkal hours is expected.
At present, only the e-ticketing site books around 48 per cent of the total reserved tickets on the Indian Railways network.
Recently in his budget speech, Union Railway Minister Pawan Bansal had announced to increase the booking rate from the present frequency of around 2,000 tickets to 7,200 tickets per minute.