Technical stats & info about IRCTC - India's largest e-commerce website

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism corporation (IRCTC) is a PSU of Indian Railways. Its website irctc.co.in is used for purchasing Railway E-Tickets.

From a Ministry of Railways press note -

• irctc.co.in is managed in-house by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), the IT arm of Indian Railways.  
• The data-center is in the premises of CRIS.  
• About 5.48 lakh tickets were booked in a single day in April 2016 with 2.66 lakh peak concurrent users.  About 13,600 tickets per minute were booked.
• The E-ticketing system has several components viz., internet gateway, network security devices such as gateway router and Firewall, Application Delivery Controller, Security Information Event Management System (SIEM) web server and database server access logs.  
• The IT security of E-ticketing system is ensured through regular security audits by Standardization Testing Quality Certification (STQC) directorate of Department of Electronics and IT, Government of India. 
• The entire traffic flowing on E-ticketing system internet gateway is also forwarded to CERT-In in real-time for monitoring and alerting.  
• The gaps reported by STQC in their penetration testing have been addressed.  However, auditing is an ongoing process and security audit of E-ticketing system is undertaken biannually.
• Audit trails are maintained for access to the system and all sensitive data like passwords etc are stored in encrypted form.  
• In addition to this, 24x7 monitoring of the system is done throughout the year by technical team of experts.  
• Strict physical checks are already in place in the data-center like restricted access to data-center, CCTV cameras at entry and exit points of data-center.

From an interview of AK Manocha, chairman and managing director, IRCTC (13/Jun/15):

• The number of concurrent users is expected to go up from the existing 1,80,000 to 3,00,000 and the existing capacity to book around 15,000 tickets per minute will go up considerably.
• Railway ticket reservations booking has been extended from 60 days to 120 days from the date of journey
• Revenues for 2014-15 period are Rs 1,050 crore and PAT is Rs 150 crore. 
• Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation is "in the process of setting up 5,000 water vending machines across 1,200 railway stations in the country. Passengers will able to buy fresh and unadulterated water for Rs 5 a litre, Rs 3 for half a litre and Rs 1 per glass". A decade ago passengers were able to make do with water supplied for free at the kiosks at the station.

Interesting info on IRCTC, India's largest e-commerce website, from today's edition of Economic Times- 

• Successful transactions a minute - 1,500-2000
• Servers - 52, with plans to add 18 more 
• Value of tickets booked - $1.6 billion (@ 50 INR/$) or INR 8000 crore
• Registered users - 250 million or 2.5 crore
• Concurrent transactions (peak) - 800,000
• Tickets booked per day - 4,50,000
• Of the 8 lakh people who log on simultaneously between 8 am 8.10am, only 50,000 manage to get tickets. 
• Advance money that IRCTC pays Indian Railways every day - 50 lakhs
• It is built on the BroadVision platform.
• The site was launched in Aug 2002 and 29 tickets sold on the first day. IRCTC, the organization, started in 1999.
• Currently (October 2013), IRCTC sells 4.7 lakh tickets (or nearly half a million tickets) a day on an average and generates a daily business of Rs 50 crore, making it the largest e-commerce portal in Asia Pacific.

Related: List of Stations & Trains managed by Indian Railways