Gone in 60 seconds: Railways plug gap that allowed touts to book 4,000 tickets in a minute

Everyone who has ever woken up to sit before a computer at 8 am knows just how difficult it is to book a ticket on Indian Railways through the IRCTC website. It now turns out the reason you may have found it so difficult to book a ticket may be the fact that touts were reportedly hoarding up to 4,000 tickets daily through ticket counters and the railways are now fixing that loophole.[caption id="attachment_2162385" align="alignleft" width="380" class=" "] Reuters image.[/caption]A senior official in the Indian Railways said that they had discovered that touts were buying tickets minutes after counters opened at 8 am."Touts would buy any ticket a day in advance and the next day, they would get ticket details changed. The booking clerk merely had to generate another PNR with the passenger details already fed into the system a day earlier. This took seconds," Ajay Shukla, Member (Traffic) of the Railway Board told The Indian Express. The touts would reportedly buy tickets for a relatively less popular trains a day earlier and then swap them for tickets on popular trains within minutes with the help of some booking clerks. The railways are now planning action against the clerks involved.The loophole has reportedly now been fixed and anyone wanting to change bookings can only do so after the first hour of booking, Shukla was quoted as saying. And the results are already visible, with only a handful of transactions being done to modify journeys daily now.