New Delhi, Feb.10 (ANI): In a huge recognition, the new version of Next Generation e-Ticketing System (NGET) introduced by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has been bestowed gold in national award for e-governance 2015-16 in the category of “Innovative Use of ICT by Central Government PSUs”.
The award seeks to recognize projects implemented by Central Government PSUs that demonstrate effective and innovative use of ICT which resulted in improvement in outcomes related to efficiency, effectiveness of process, cost, quality and service delivery.
The awards were announced at the 19th National Conference on e-Governnace, held recently at Nagpur.
IRCTC, a ‘mini Ratna PSU’ of Indian Railways, has introduced new NGET as its signature product/service to cater to the increased traffic on its portal and improve the experience of people booking tickets through the Internet.
The new NGET can handle a peak load of 120,000 concurrent users to book seven lakh tickets a day. The capacity has now been enhanced to booking 1,500 tickets per minute and 3,500 enquiries per second besides 3 lakh concurrent user connections.
IRCTC Chairman and Managing Director, Dr. A K Manocha said, “The Gold award is not only a tremendous achievement but also a huge affirmation of the company’s commitment to introduce passenger-friendly measures on a sustained basis.”
“We have been leveraging technology in a most useful manner. The major beneficiaries of the project are the common people as the project has empowered them through technology. It has also increased the revenue of Railways and banks which are now managing large volumes of money transactions done at IRCTC,” Manocha noted.
IRCTC has increased its revenue generated by ticket booking from Rs. 82.61 crore in 2008-09 to Rs. 284.45 crore in 2013-14. As for NGET, a total of 1295.17 lakh tickets were booked through this system. Due to up-gradation of NGET, IRCTC achieved the sale of 14, 800 tickets per minute, a record. Around 14.9 crore tickets booked on IRCTC’s portal till December 2015.
It has also helped to reduce cost in terms of PRS (Passenger Reservation System) counters and manpower to sell tickets. IRCTC commands about 55 per cent share of total reserved tickets booked.
The project covers all the 29 states and 7 union territories. Plans are also underway to make the e-ticketing portal of IRCTC in Hindi to cater to the needs of people in Hindi-speaking states.
Some of the services offered by NGET are online ticketing (e-ticket and i-ticket), e-catering, air ticketing, Tatkal booking, FTR (Full Tariff Rate) for coach and train booking, shopping on e-commerce portals, payment gateways, e-wallet, and loyalty programme. (ANI)
