One has to discount the quality of website by the fact that Indian railways is still a government organisation, overstaffed and employing >15 lac people.

Inspite of this, its a leap of faith & a paradigm shift for them to allow the customers to book tickets and select their seats themselves.

the frontend can improve but kudos to them for having a robust middle and backends to handle such a complex web.

You all sound biased stereotypes with a predetermined view about everything government. You are in for a surprise

Manu:!: You are welcome.
The purpose of his presentation was to show the progress of Railway in IT field. So he talked more about the number of reservations being done online in a day, etc in progressive way. And he also added around 30% of the tickets booked are cancelled.

On this a fellow Company Secretary, very rightly raised the point, then why the online system doesn’t provide for cancellation facility, as for canellation, we have to run to the Railway booking center.

On that he said we are looking into the possibility of implementing such a system. Most of his reply were similar.

Plus he added the new PNR number system is going to be implemented, in which a PNR number will never be repeated in the next 5 or 10 years (don’t remember exactly).

Manu, if you want to have the email id of Mr Deepak Chhabra, I will email you.
You can send him the suggestions, as you are an expert in ecommerce websites.

And who knows maybe they decide to hire your services in future

The number of people that visit site has to be quite high and its necessary that it is accessible and customer-friendly.

The Internet is great. It has made the world much much smaller.

Ankur! It’s a small world isnt it. Here I was reading about CRIS yesterday and today I come across someone who just met the head honcho of CRIS few days ago. That’s why I love the internet!

And thanks for offering to write to him about it. Though I think it would take a lot of explanation to convince someone in his position, to implement change, than merely complaining [which is what I did]. Maybe I should do a thorough critique of the site on my blog.

I mean, IndianRail.gov.in is such an important site. The designers, if there are any, seem completely unaware of site’s usability while hundreds of users suffer everyday.

I still think Laloo was involved somewhere.. he must have paid the priests to not move the Diwali date forward to October so that Neeraj wouldn’t go during that time and then i wouldn’t make this post!

Good one!

But you could have posted it earlier, only if Neeraj had travelled then, but Neeraj would have travelled, only if Diwali was in October end

And Diwali could have been earlier only if Priests had announced some earlier date for Diwali

So Priests are responsible for the delay. Otherwise we could have some improvements in our Online Railway Reservation system

Does this make any sense

That Deepak guy will definitely be positive because its his group that outputted that behkaar sight that we call the Indian Railways website.

Maybe I should have posted this earlier…that or should you have told me that you were going to that seminar.

When you have to catch the train, it’s true… the coolies have more knowledge about the arrival & Departure than railway dept.

As regards the online booking system, on 30th Oct, I attended a seminar titled Company Secretary & IT, where one of the speaker was Mr Deepak Chhabra, General Manager, Passenger Railway System (PRS), CRIS.

He is the person who maintains the website. In his 40 minutes speech, he was very positive about the Online Reservation System provided by his department.

Wish I knew all these points before the seminar… but still I can email him link to this discussion