44 India's Best IT Implementations of the year 2005

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Friday, June 03, 2005

Overall Best Telephonic train ticket booking IRCTC 

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Project Head: Amitabh Pandey, Group GM- IT Services, J. Vinayan, Joint GM-Operations Location: All India

This project claims to be the first mobile commerce project in the country and is available over both the cellphones and land lines. Our jury was unanimous in its opinion that the future impact of this project would be tremendous, cutting across geographies, languages and classes.

IRCTC's Internet ticketing project won the award last time for having the maximum social impact. This year, when they reentered the fray, to be frank, we were skeptical on whether they could have achieved something new of similar scale yet again. However our audit of the project proved that they had, and the jury had no hesitation in awarding it the top prize. In fact, this is the only project to get the highest ratings from all jury members.

The project under discussion rides on top of the Internet ticket-booking project that got the award last year. What the current project does is to make available a Web service to telephony service providers- both fixed and mobile-that they can in turn use to provide train ticket booking services to their customers. For cellphones, you can have both SMS and IVR (voice) based booking services, while for the landlines, the service will be over voice.

Prior to the launch of full booking services, a PNR alert service over SMS was launched, over a four-digit short code 7245, to which you can SMS your PNR number and receive up to four SMSs informing of changing status of the ticket on the 8th, 3rd, 2nd day before journey, and on the day of journey. This service is available on Airtel, Hutch/Orange, Idea, MTNL-Delhi, MTNL-Mumbai, Reliance & Tata Phones.

For the booking service, which is an extension of this effort, the concerned operators have to build their own application for making the service available to their customers.

Three operators already offer this service across the country. 

J. Vinayan Joint General Manager/ Operations

Idea Cellular: SpeechRecognition Application
Hutch/Orange: SpeechRecognition/ GPRS
Reliance: CDMA (Java Based) Five more operators are finalizing their applications for rollout.
Tata Indicom: For cellphones andWLL phones-Speech Recognition
Reliance: Speech Recognition
BSNL: Menu driven application on GSM phones, Speech Recognition
MTNL Delhi: Speech Recognition
Airtel: Speech Recognition, Menu driven application on GSM phones, Landline Speech Recognition on Touchtel phones. 
Unlike conventional IVR systems, speech recognition based systems will actually let you book rail tickets over the phone without punching numbers and going through a complex menu. Such systems are quite popular abroad, but their deployments in India are still fairly low. 

The application runs on HP Proliant servers, on BroadVision's One-to-One Enterprise e-commerce platform. A combination of Tomcat and Apache running on Windows is used to provide the webservices to the operators. 

A new service being planned is the booking of a ticket with just two SMSs, once you have registered at the IRCTC site and filled in the required information. This will be an SMS short code-based service and will be available soon.

Another factor that makes the project stand out is the number of agencies, both government and private that are working in tandem on the project. There is CRIS, which manages the original railway reservation system. BroadVision developed the e-commerce application with an Oracle backend, HCL is charged with the network and its security. 

Fifteen banks from both the private and public sectors offer online payment through direct debit from users' accounts maintained with the bank, while three online payment gateways process credit card payments (it is cheaper to book tickets through direct debit than by credit card). Payments can also be effected through a cash card provider. Delivering the SMA or voice booking service to the end customer are a plethora of telephony service operators, both state owned and private. And courier delivery is effected through Overnite express. Finally, bringing all these together is the IRCTC, a subsidiary of Indian Railways.

Our jury was of the unanimous opinion that in sheer reach and in the ability to bring about a sea change in attitude as well as approach, this project outshone the rest of the contenders. 

It also builds up and extends the excellent foundation they have built for online ticket reservation, which today has achieved a monthly turnover of 2 lakh tickets booked and a revenue of Rs 29 crore. Thus it is a fitting winner of the Best IT implementation project of the year award.

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