A hack for train ticket booking gets IIT award

India has the world’s second largest railway network after China, but it’s overcrowded because a large population of over 1.25 billion mostly depends on trains for long distance travel. There are huge inefficiencies in this sprawling rail network, especially in ticket booking. Tech startups like ConfirmTkt and RailYatri have been stepping up of late to make life a little easier for train travelers.

The latest to tackle the problem of getting reserved berths or seats in the thousands of trains that run in India is Ticket Jugaad, an Android app that arrived on Google Play last week. What draws attention to the app is that it’s the winner of the products & services track in this year’s Empresario – an annual competition run by the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, in association with the International Business Model Competition (IBMC), co-hosted by Stanford, Harvard, and Brigham University – according to a statement from the IIT-KGP entrepreneurship cell.

Ticket Jugaad uses an interesting hack (the English equivalent of the Hindi term jugaad) to help a user travel when there is no confirmed reservation available on a particular route. Often a reservation may be available on an alternate route or a patch-up of multiple routes by taking advantage of seats left vacant by passengers who book them for shorter distances. The Ticket Jugaad app’s algorithm works out several options in a snap and helps a traveler make the bookings. Sounds like a desperate measure but that’s what rail passengers often resort to in India and fall prey to touts. Some tech wizardry to help find solutions would be most welcome to them.

An idea born on a train journey

Photo credit: Ryan

Ticket Jugaad is cofounded by Shubham Baldava, a computer science graduate of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Jamshedpur, and Runal Jaju, a student at IIT Kharagpur. Shubham used to shuttle between his home town of Nagpur and Jamshedpur in his student days and constantly run into problems with train reservations. Several stations on the route had quotas of reserved tickets which he noticed were underutilized. One day he wrote a simple computer program to make use of these quotas to hack out patchwork reservations for his journeys, and it worked.

He shared this with his cousin Runal, who was studying at IIT and facing similar train reservation problems. Runal took it a step further by linking up the app with ticket provider Cleartrip and publishing it on Google Play.

“The main challenge was to reduce the time required to process each query for long train routes with lots of stations. The second challenge was to create a user interface that will be easy to understand for the common Indian user,” Runal tells Tech in Asia.

The most important thing that the Empresario win has given the young Ticket Jugaad founders is confidence to press ahead as entrepreneurs. “Now that we know the product has been liked by people and the judges, we plan to take it to the next level. We have two new hacks planned which have never been introduced by any other app,” declares Runal.

The uses of old smartphones

Photo credit: Jon Fingas

There was also a social track at Empresario, and the winner in that category is Soteria Solutions. It’s using refurbished smartphones to build products in the IoT (internet of things) field. The first product, called Novis2, is a surveillance system with pan-tilt-zoom functionality and features like “record on motion only” and cloud storage of recorded media. At a price point below INR 1000 (US$15), it aims to be affordable to the masses. Soteria will also get a chance to make a pitch at the IBMC semi-finals in the US in April.

The IIT Kharagpur entrepreneurship cell, which conducted the Empresario competition, had shortlisted 110 candidates from whom the eventual winners Ticket Jugaad and Soteria emerged. The cell has been a breeding ground for some of the coolest startups in India. Customer engagement software maker Capillary Technologies, math app Splashmath, used vehicles marketplace GoZoomo, logistics provider Roadrunnr, price discovery startup BuyHatke, hiring platform Venturesity, TravelTriangle, SignEasy, Carbon Clean Solutions, Mapmygenome, and several others trace their roots back to IIT-KGP entrepreneurship cell.