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Railways' only one-ticket-per-login rule to trip speed software touts

The railway ministry's decision to allow only one booking in one user login session while reserving tickets on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation's (IRCTC) website is being seen as the ministry's biggest response against the widespread use of speed software by touts to corner tickets on the site.

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The railway ministry's decision to allow only one booking in one user login session while reserving tickets on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation's (IRCTC) website is being seen as the ministry's biggest response against the widespread use of speed software by touts to corner tickets on the site.

How will it work?
According to a statement issued by the railways, there will be a restriction of only one booking in one login session, after which the user, including IRCTC agents, will get logged out automatically. For another booking, the person will have to log back in and the same process will follow.

What's IRCTC saying?
Speaking to dna, IRCTC group general manager Sunil Kumar said, "It is to ensure that people booking tickets using underhanded methods are prevented from doing so. It will help give genuine commuters a larger number of available seats/berths."

Will the new method work?
A section of officials believes that the measure might not help much. According to them, ticket booking on IRCTC is one of the biggest operations of the railways and it should be done in such a way that touts get tripped every time. "The rules to restrict a user session to just one ticket is a short-term solution, which will work for sometime before touts come up with something better. The real solution is to keep upgrading and changing the script of the software on which the IRCTC system runs, so that it remains ahead of the manipulations of touts," said an official.

The scam that rocked rlys
Mumbai was at the centre of the country's biggest speed software touting bust when several people were arrested by the Central Railway's RPF unit for cornering a large number of tickets at one go. Among them was the developer of the software, Kulbir Singh from Ahmedabad, who was arrested on September 28.
A report prepared on the scam by the railways showed that using speed software that was bypassing the 'captcha' mechanism of the IRCTC website, touts were booking almost 128 tickets per minute. Investigators found that some of them were using a high-speed data connection and 10 computers to book almost 1,000 tickets every minute.

Number game
5 lakh tickets booked daily on the IRCTC website
1.25 lakh tickets cancelled daily on the website
18 lakh: Total number of logins per day
53% tickets IRCTC booking accounts for

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