Booking train tickets in India just got easier with new Android app

Indians just got another reason to celebrate during this festive season of Diwali. The Indian railway ticketing authority IRCTC has launched a new IRCTC Connect free app for Android smartphones. You cannot access it between 8 AM and 12 PM though.

With this app, registered users of IRCTC can simply login, and start planning their train trips, book tickets, and cancel easily. New users will have to sign up. Users can also search for trains, check reservation status, and get upcoming journey alerts. The app retains passenger details once fed, but does not sync with the booking history.

The app has a few glitches though. For example, one cannot enter a password of more than ten characters. There is no provision to change the password or check Passenger Name Record (PNR) status. PNR is a record in the Indian railway database that contains the itinerary of the traveler.

IRCTC had introduced its first official app on Microsoft Windows as well as Windows Phone and then on BlackBerry 10 OS. Now, with the IRCTC Connect on Android, a larger number of smartphone owners can access it conveniently.

In March, IRCTC had announced that its site books more than 463,000 tickets everyday, which translates to an astounding daily transaction of more than INR530 million(US$8.6 million). This makes it one of the biggest ecommerce sites globally.

A couple of months back, the IRCTC website was spruced up by the authorities at a cost of INR180 crore (US$30 million) to handle 7,200 ticket bookings per minute.

The IRCTC Connect app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store.