Why Indian Railways Online Ticketing is so bad

I found another rant on the state of Indian Railways' online ticket booking website in Hacker News. It is horrible and here I am going to tell you why.

Monopoly

We may have cleartrip, makemytrip, and yatra, but, these services cannot book special tatkal tickets which are open only from 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM three days before the day of travel. For frequent travelers, this is the only type of ticket which matters.

So, even though other sites exists, IRCTC as such is a monopoly.

API Access

For getting the API access, the company needs to have been around for 3 years. All startups banned by default. Nice.

Anyway when you annually make $15M profit by being a monopoly you want the status quo...m and when the status quo is being a monopoly, you don't mind being a wreck...

India's Corruption - Make Transactions Transparent

We the people have at last risen against corruption. People are fasting, marching, and at the very least blogging and tweeting about the whole stuff.

So let me do my part, I read a very very interesting article about how Slovenia is tackling it. They have created a website Supervizer, where the expenditure of the govt. to contractors can be seen by anyone with Internet access.

So why can't we do the same? The govt should just keep track of all expenditures online and making it search-able should not be a big deal at all. If they can create the UID, to keep track of us - the people, why shouldn't they take a far smaller effort to make ALL expenditures and incomes available online.

We should be able to know to which private contractors/companies the central and state govs. are giving projects, etc. even to whom the govt is donating money, or land, or housing.

By the way all political parties must be thoroughly audited and make it online too. Where do they get the funds for all these newspaper ads, tv ads? How are they able to spend so much and organise rallies? Make it available online, We should be able to see it.

If small Slovenia can, India with Infosys, TCS etc. should definitely be able to do it. The question can we make them do it?

Friends forward this, I sincerely hope this reaches Team Anna!!!

PS: For more details about Slovenia - http://www.funkykaraoke.com/2011/08/transparency.html