Were you charged money by the IRCTC against Online railway tickets but had received an error resulting in failure to book the ticket? You are not the only one. The IRCTC has mentioned that over the past year since April 2011 to the June 2012 there were more than 12 crore tickets that were purchased online, payments were made, but there was a network failure error and hence tickets were not booked, Minister of State for Railways told the Rajya Sabha. He also said that wrong entry of the passwords has also led to the errors.

Bharath Sinh Solanki, speaking to the Railways said that "From April 2011 to March 2012, a total of 11.62 crore tickets were booked successfully through the IRCTC website”. In over 96.12 lakh cases, the subscribers had also paid the money but the tickets gave them a miss.  In only two months, May and June 2012, there were 24.6 lakhs of similar cases.
He added, "The reasons for such incomplete transaction included entry of wrong password, network failure, etc."

He also said the steps have now been taken to prevent such errors in future. The server capacities were all increased to ensure that the demand is met. The existing internet bandwidth speed of 350 mbps was increased to 450 mbps. The IRCTC has also been consulting several banks on the payment gateways to lower the number of failed cases of transactions.

(AW- Anil)