Net rail ticket sales soar

Booking of railway tickets through Internet has become a big business. "Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC)'s website has become the biggest e-commerce site in south-east Asia," says its Managing Director MN Chopra. The site is just about a year old. It began booking of rail tickets on August 2 last year.

The number of tickets booked online in August this year was 60,000 compared with just 1,300 tickets booked in the same month last year.

In its first year of operations, the site has clocked sales worth Rs 55 crore. Now, the site deals with business of Rs 10 crore every month.

What is more, an of average 3,300 tickets, resulting in a business of Rs 45 lakh, have been booked daily this month.

Analysts feel that a business-to-consumer (B2C) site should be judged on four parameters: number of transactions, turnover from the transactions, number of products on offer and options on the mode of payment.

Business Standard did a sample survey of well known B2C e-commerce websites in the country. The closest that anybody got to the monthly turnover of IRCTC was Rs 5 crore a month reported by indiatimes.com and mahamaza.com.

While a large number of e-commerce sites did not divulge their turnover figures, there was the unanimous acceptance of IRCTC's leadership.

The railways' online ticket-booking facility is available in 67 towns with IRCTC planning to expand the service to 200 more towns in the current financial year.

Along with reservation of tickets using credit and debt cards, IRCTC will also allow consumers to call up their banks such as ICICI, HDFC, UTI and SBI and ask them to get the railway tickets.

Sify also accepts payments through Internet banking accounts. In a few weeks, it will be possible to book railway tickets through Reliance mobile phones.

However, if one were to see the margins retained, then IRCTC is a poor cousin of its private sector cousins.

The railway undertaking got to retain just Rs 1 crore of the Rs 55 crore worth tickets it sold in the first year of operation, while leading portals such as Indiatimes have earnings worth Rs 2-2.5 crore every month.