Pradeep Singh

New Delhi/Bhubaneswar: The Indian Railways has brought in some new rules to strengthen the online ticket reservation system, including the Tatkal booking.

Some of the measures taken by the government are:

  1. Six tickets (maximum) in a month can be booked from one user ID and it can be extended to 12, if the ID is Aadhaar verified
  2. A maximum of two tickets can be booked during opening advance reservation period between 8:00 am and 10:00 am.
  3. A user can have only one login session active at one point of time either from multiple windows of same browser or different browsers.
  4. Quick book functionality (single page for booking tickets) is not accessible from 8:00 am to 12:00 noon.
  5. Besides Captcha code, an additional security question is asked randomly after passenger input page related to user personal information- user name, mobile number, email etc.
  6. A minimum input time has been set at 5 seconds for different input page.
  7. Irrespective of the number of passengers, only 25 seconds is provided for to fill the commuters’ details in the passenger detail form.
  8. To carry out payment, a minimum time check is set at 10 seconds.
  9. Online mode of payments- net banking, one-time password (OTP) system- mandatory.
  10. Ticket Agents are not allowed to book tickets from 08:00 am to 08:30 am, 10:00 am to 10:30 am and 11:00 am to 11:30 am. Besides. Aadhaar Card is mandatory for agents’ registration.

Refund against Cancellation of Confirmed/RAC/Wait-List Tickets

Taking cognizance of misuse of Tatkal scheme, IRCTC doesn’t have ‘refund’ rule for confirmed Tatkal tickets. However, it can be refunded in some exceptional cases:

  1. If the train is delayed by over three hours at the journey originating point of a passenger and not his boarding point- if the passenger's journey originating point and boarding point are different.
  2. If the train is to run on a diverted route but the passenger is not interested to travel on that route.
  3. If the train is to run on diverted route and boarding station or the destination or both the stations are not on the diverted route.
  4. In case of non-attachment of coach in which Tatkal accommodation has been earmarked and the passenger has not been provided accommodation in the same class.
  5. If the passenger has been provided a lower class in which he/she does not want to travel.
  6. In case of RAC and wait-listed tickets, refund will be made only if the confirmed ticket is present for cancellation up to 30 minutes before the scheduled departure of the train.
  7. The refund of fare will be made after deducting the clerkage.

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