Your chances of getting a confirmed train ticket on a popular route on the Indian Railways have just gone up. The Indian Railways claim to have uncovered and plugged a loophole that allowed as many as 4,000 confirmed berths to be hoarded by touts within one minute of the computer reservation system being thrown open to public everyday.

The touts were misusing a facility that allowed journey details on an existing booking to be altered at the last moment, thus changing their tickets for unpopular routes to popular trains within seconds of the opening of the ticketing for the day.  “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), Railway Board, told The Indian Express. “We have now disabled this facility for the first hour after the system opens.”

The latest revelations only confirm what has been known all along: the system of booking tickets on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation website badly needed fixing. Stories about gaming the system have come to light earlier as well.  For instance, a gang in Uttar Pradesh was exposed a few years ago, as it allegedly generated PNR numbers after connecting to the IRCTC website using a software called Triple X.

Ironically, each such revelation has invariably ended up adding to the cynicism about the railway reservation system, which in any case has long been the butt of jokes from social media, with a lot of angst reserved for the tatkal system. We present a quick sampling below.