Two engineering students have launched a mobile app that uses a unique algorithm to find out alternative routes for getting seats in trains. The "Ticket Jugaad" app is developed by second-year Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, student Runal Jaju and his cousin Shubham Baldava, who studies at the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. The app automatically finds available tickets from stations before or after the entered source destination to provide passengers the maximum path that can be covered with a confirmed ticket.

The Indian Railways allow passengers to board trains from a station that comes after the booking destination. Jaju told PTI, "There are some station-wise quotas for ticket booking. For example if you are booking a ticket from station A, it might show [the status as] waiting list, but when you book it from a previous station you might get the ticket. If you try to find out such stations manually, it becomes tough but our app has automated this."

Jaju added that ticket agents are experts in manually calculating such combinations to find seats, but they charge a hefty fee from passengers. "What we do is to provide you with all the possible permutations and combinations to cover the maximum part of your journey," he said. The app is being supported by the Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT and also won the first prize of Rs 1.5 lakh in IIT Kharagpur’s Annual Global Business Model Competition.