IRCTC plans to triple ticketing capacity to over 1 lakh bookings a minute

IRCTC plans to upgrade its NGET ticketing platform from 37,000 to more than 1 lakh tickets processed per minute. The rail booking platform has also launched a simplified beta website and is considering an active-active disaster recovery facility in Secunderabad.

— Source publishedWed, 26 Aug, 2026, 11:38 IST·First seen Wed, 26 Aug, 2026, 11:41 IST·Source ET Small Business

What happened

IRCTC plans to upgrade its NGET ticketing platform, raising processing capacity from 37,000 to more than 1 lakh tickets per minute. It is also considering an

Key facts

  • 37,000 tickets per minute
  • Over 1 lakh tickets per minute
  • Rs 150 crore

Why this matters

IRCTC’s NGET upgrade creates potential partnership opportunities for travel, payments, and ancillary-service players seeking access to a higher-throughput rail-booking ecosystem.

What to watch

  • Measured tickets processed per minute and successful payment-to-ticket issuance rates during Tatkal and festival periods.
  • Changes in booking abandonment, queue duration, app/web crash rates, and customer complaints.
  • Bot-blocking actions, CAPTCHA or identity-policy changes, and enforcement against unauthorized booking agents.
  • Launch timing, adoption, and conversion metrics for the simplified beta website.
  • Confirmation of the Secunderabad active-active facility, successful failover tests, and any migration-related outages.
  • Growth in IRCTC ancillary revenue per booking and new partnerships in food, hotels, insurance, and ground transport.
  • Deploy virtual waiting rooms, dynamic throttling, and bot-risk scoring alongside the throughput upgrade.
  • Use the simplified beta site to shorten search-to-payment flows and test personalized ancillary bundles for food, insurance, hotels, and first/last-mile transport.
  • Prioritize payment failover, real-time booking-status messaging, and one-click rebooking/refund workflows to convert reliability gains into customer trust.
  • Create peak-period merchant partnerships around station pickup, destination services, and rail-linked travel packages.
  • Phase active-active disaster recovery with load tests during non-peak windows and publish reliability metrics to demonstrate improvement.