Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said bots accounted for 58% [1] of India’s rail ticket booking requests over the last six months.
This surge in automated activity disrupts the fair allocation of tickets, particularly for high-demand Tatkal services, and allows unauthorized agents to resell seats at inflated prices.
Addressing the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, Vaishnaw provided a breakdown of the traffic hitting the IRCTC online ticketing platform. He said that an average of 15.38 billion [1] monthly requests were received for booking a rail ticket online, of which 8.88 billion [1] were from bots.
This volume of automated traffic, which can also be expressed as 888 crore [2] requests per month, highlights the scale of the technical challenge facing the railway ministry. The bots are designed to bypass standard user interfaces to secure tickets faster than human passengers can.
"Bots accounted for 58% of the rail booking requests over the last six months," Vaishnaw said [1].
The government is currently implementing measures to curb these automated bookings to ensure that genuine passengers have equitable access to the rail network. These efforts target the software tools used by unauthorized agents to scrape data, and automate the purchase process.
"15.38 billion monthly requests were received for booking a rail ticket online, on average, of which 8.88 billion were from bots," Vaishnaw said [1].
“Bots accounted for 58% of the rail booking requests over the last six months.”
The high volume of bot traffic indicates a sophisticated secondary market where automated scripts outpace human users to monopolize limited inventory. By quantifying this threat, the Indian government is shifting from viewing ticket scalping as a minor nuisance to treating it as a systemic technical failure that requires robust cybersecurity and anti-bot infrastructure to protect public access to affordable transport.
