More tatkal tickets to be available from now on as Indian Railways busts illegal e-ticketing racket

Travelling by train might just get easy for you soon, as the number of tatkal tickets is all set to increase. A top official from the Indian Railways informed that railway passengers will now be able to book more tickets as they have arrested around 60 agents and weeded out illegal software that were used by the agents to block such tickets.

Referring to this development, Railway Protection Force (RPF) Director-General Arun Kumar said that this cleansing operation by the India Railways will eventually lead to the availability of more tatkal tickets, and also make these available for more hours, instead of a minute or two as it was earlier when the booking opens.

Railways officials stated that illegal software, such as MAC, ANMS, and Jaguar were earlier used to bypass the IRCTC’s login and booking captcha, and also bank OTP to generate the tickets. While a genuine user would normally take around 2.55 min to follow the said procedure and book a tatkal ticket, that aforementioned software would help agents to book tickets in just around 1.48 min. Thus, in this process, a genuine user would mostly miss his chance to book a tatkal ticket.
Latest reports suggest that over the past two months, the Indian Railways has nabbed as many as 60 illegal agents, whose software were not letting normal users get tatkal tickets. Recently, the RPF Director-General announced that not even a single ticket has been booked through the illegal software as of now.

The general further added that with the arrests, the illegal software used to generate business of INR 50 to 100 crore annually, and the same have now been blocked.