The Railways will soon roll out a revamped version of the IRCTC website making it faster and easier to book tickets, an official said.
“We are going to completely revamp our passenger reservation portal IRCTC. The final testing is going on and it will roll out sometime in August. This will have many more facilities. This will have easy access and it will reduce the time taken by the passenger to book a ticket,” Railway Board Chairman VK Yadav said on Thursday.
Mr. Yadav said the portal will have Artificial Intelligence capabilities integrated into it. “When passengers book the ticket, based on the analysis of the past data, the AI feature will be able to forecast the chances of reservation confirmation. It can also suggest options for the routes.”
The Chairman said the Railways have finalised the contract for offering content-on-demand onboard the train. However, the roll out has been delayed due to COVID-19 and will be rolled out immediately when the normalcy returns.
Zero-based timetable
Mr. Yadav said a “zero-based” time-table, meaning that the schedule and frequency of all time-tabled trains will be revised, is being prepared. “We have been working on this system for more than six months and have associated some external consultants also, some simulation going on... We are analysing a lot of data and trying to ascertain the traffic demand and how the timetable should be fixed.”
He said they also looking at introducing a “hub and spoke” model, where long distance trains will be connected with several short distance ones at important stations. “We are also working on a system where the passenger can buy only one ticket to travel by two trains...for that it is very necessary that all trains run punctually. We will make our best so that there is no discomfort or inconvenience to any segment or passenger,” he said
Mr. Yadav said the Railways have met the demands of States for Shramik specials and the last one was run on July 9. The Railways have run 4,615 such trains since May 1, ferrying over 63 lakh people.
