Rant: IRCTC Tatkal booking has become a complete joke. What exactly are we paying for?
Tried booking a Tatkal ticket for my mother today and the IRCTC website and Railone App experience was absolute torture.
The moment Tatkal opened, the site started throwing nonstop errors:
High traffic,
Session expired,
Random logouts,
Payment failures,
Login issues.....
I must have logged in 10 times just to get kicked out again. And no, it wasn’t my internet. Stable high-speed connection, same issue across both devices. Even used a VPN on one device. The system simply cannot handle the traffic during Tatkal hours, despite this being a daily predictable event for YEARS.
What’s even more frustrating is how difficult Regular ticket bookings have become nowadays, especially during summer. Most trains go into waiting list almost immediately after opening. Then suddenly during Tatkal, limited seats appear and disappear within seconds. Premium Tatkal prices also shoot up to ridiculous levels, sometimes nearly 3-4x the normal fare. So now passengers are expected to fight server crashes and pay insane prices.
At this point Tatkal booking feels less about speed and more about luck, bots, agents, and whether IRCTC servers decide to function for 30 seconds. I literally meditated for 5 min to not mistakenly pass on my frustration onto someone!
The funniest part? IRCTC reportedly handles millions of transactions daily and earns massive revenue from convenience fees, service charges, Premium Tatkal pricing, catering commissions, ads, tourism packages, etc. Yet during the single most critical booking window of the day, the platform still collapses under “high traffic.” Humans discovered Mars water before IRCTC discovered load balancing.
I seriously want to know:
Is IRCTC intentionally limiting concurrent users during Tatkal?
Why are so few confirmed seats available in the normal quota nowadays?
Why does Premium Tatkal pricing become absurdly expensive so fast?
And importantly,
- How TF is this level of server instability and incompetence still considered acceptable in 2026?
For a country where railways are the lifeline for millions, the booking experience is honestly embarrassing. Every Tatkal booking feels less like buying a train ticket and more like participating in an online survival game.