Why Indian Railways sucks....

All said and all done...with huge profits, management lectures and turnaround stories and all the nonsense and sense surrounding it all, Indian Railways still have miles to go to give satisfactory service or be termed as "Customer Centric"

All these years of Raj, Babudom, Communism, Socialism and other retrogressive policies has cast a mindset which is anything but customer focussed. With the growing popularity of internet in urban India, a new face of Indian railway came up; www.irctc.com; for ticket booking. It started with advance booking (atleast 2 clear date from the day of journey) thru' I-ticket model and evolved into the no frills e-ticket. Recently, this website was adjudged as the highest earning e-commerce site.

But no sooner it became popular, signs of a creaky crappy service started showing up. Denial of service right from Server Unavailability, Accomodation availability not being available, Payment getting bounced etc. have become its regular feature. In its latest round of disappointment, I was denied booking of tatkal tickets for my parents on 2142 Rajendra Nagar-Mumbai CSTM Sup. Fast Exp as the tatkal availability checking and booking for some selected trains were blocked due to some some unknown reason. On calling the 24X7 Custome Care center, the representative took almost 5 mintues to get to the screen which I had reported and replied that she cannot do anything as the Tatkal Status is being shown unavailable. Moreover, as informed by her, there was no system to get this issue reported to senior officials. IRCTC website has a complaints and feedback link wherein I reported my story. No wonder, I have not received any response as of now. Ironically, while tracking the accomodation availability through www.erail.in , I helplessly saw Tatkal tickets availability and their subsequent conversion to waitlist. After much search over internet and trials on the website, I found out that tatkal booking from my departing station is not allowed now, and there is no public information to this regards, and has to be done from one staion preceding the onward journey. Grrrrr...whom to be blamed...i cant say.

The Great Indian Railways has made the tatkal scheme an additional source of income, due to which one may not get clear reservation days ahead of journey as a large chunk of seats are blocked for Tatkal. So, travellers have no option left but to wait for tatkal and then face the totally inefficient reservation system. Moreover, insignificant refunds are made on cancelling a Tatkal ticket.

The basic problem is that we still want to squeeze more and more from a long gone infrastructure by doing gimmicks like Tatkal. It started with a novel approach but turned into a source of illicit income for the railways with hapless citizens watching in agony and the popular press singing paens for the railway minister. There is no thought of making it more customer friendly or focussed and set an example of service management to be reckoned with. Its always as if the Railway and its staff are doing a favour by allowing Indians to use its assets after paying large sums. And most of us are happy with it.

WTF we cant change our Indian way of doing things??