The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the official platform for booking train tickets, recorded its highest-ever single-day bookings on September 7, with more than 20 lakh tickets booked amid a surge in demand ahead of the festive season. A total of 20,06,353 tickets were booked through IRCTC on September 7, marking the first time the daily figure crossed the 20-lakh mark.

The demand remained high the following day, with 19,50,699 tickets booked on September 8. This is six per cent higher than the highest single-day booking during last year's festive season of 18,40,203 tickets.

Around 89 per cent of reserved railway tickets are now booked online, IRCTC said. To handle the growing volume, new servers have been deployed, nearly doubling the capacity of the online ticket booking system.

IRCTC launched a new website and user interface on July 15, 2026, which allows passengers to view seat availability across different classes on a single screen.

The railway ticketing platform has also intensified its crackdown on bots and fraudulent booking activity. IRCTC said its anti-bot system has reduced suspicious bot traffic by 55-65 per cent.

The ticket booking platform has put in a system in place that doesn't allow authorised ticket agents to book tickets during the first 10 minutes after the booking window opens, between 8 am and 8:10 am. Aadhaar verification is also mandatory for users booking tickets when the reservation window opens.

As part of its action against fraudulent activity, IRCTC has deactivated 3.04 crore user IDs, while 6.33 crore IDs have been flagged for re-verification.

Despite the record booking volumes, IRCTC said there was no major glitch or outage in the new online ticket booking system.

Source: NDTV