Indian Railways cracks down on unauthorised automated bookings and enhances booking experience for genuine users; e-Aadhaar to soon be mandatory for booking tatkal tickets
Train travellers will soon require e-Aadhaar authentication for booking Tatkal tickets on Indian Railways. This is to help real users to get confirmed tickets by thwarting unauthorised automated booking which hoards tickets through mass booking by automated means, which severely inconveniences genuine railway travellers.
The Minsiter of Railways, Shri Ashwini Vaishnav, posted on X last night on June 04, 2025, that "Bharatiya Railways will soon start using e-Aadhaar authentication to book Tatkal tickets. This will help genuine users get confirmed tickets during need."
As of now, as per the user protocols that were introduced recently to enhance fairness and efficiency, according recent report by the Ministry of Railways, on 04 June 2025. As per this report, users who are not authenticated via Aadhaar can book Opening ARP, Tatkal or Premium Tatkal tickets only after 3 days of registration, while Aadhaar-verified users can book tickets without delay.
If you live India or you've travelled by Indian Railways trains, you'd already know about railway ticket hoarding rackets which severely inconvenience genuine travellers, such as, where touts or travel agents who unscrupulously book advance reservation tickets in bulk to illegally resell them at a higher price later.
While ticket hoarding makes genuine travellers unable to book a ticket, it also causes losses to the railways too, when the touts cancel tickets after a long time whenever they do not find enough buyers for their hoarded tickets, which may result in empty reserved births in trains which would've otherwise been fully booked.
Indian Railways or the Ministry of Railways, from time to time, take some actions to prevent or mitigate this problem, such as, around 6 month ago, Indian Railways reduced the Advance Reservation Period to 60 days, for booking train tickets.
e-Aadhaar authentication is a way to prove your identity through online authentication, where you get an OTP to your phone number that you linked your Aadhaar i.d. with, and this is used to authenticate your identity online.
As announced by the Minister of Railways, this e-Aadhaar authentication to book Tatkal tickets will help genuine users for booking tatkal tickets, as it will now require to verify identity of the person booking the ticket, through this online process.
As per the recent report by the Ministry of Railways, on 04 June 2025, Indian Railways has cracked down on unauthorised automated bookings and has boosted their booking website access for genuine users.
As per their report, Indian Railways has undertaken a comprehensive digital overhaul of its ticketing infrastructure, through the deployment of cutting-edge anti-BOT systems and integration with a leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) service provider.
As per the report, this new system has effectively mitigated all bot traffic, which peaks during the first five minutes of Tatkal booking being opened to the public. Bot traffic accounts for up to 50% of overall login attempts during this period.
It further notes that 2.5 crore (25 million) suspected user IDs were deactivated for booking tickets. As per the report, a landmark achievement was recorded on May 22, 2025, with the highest-ever per-minute booking of 31,814 tickets.
These new user protocols were introduced to further enhance fairness and efficiency. Users who have not authenticated via Aadhaar can book Opening ARP, Tatkal or Premium Tatkal tickets only after 3 days of registration, while Aadhaar-verified users can book tickets without delay.
The report says that their efforts have delivered measurable improvements, such as, the average daily user logins increasing from 69.08 lakh (6.908 million) in FY 2023–24 to 82.57 lakh (8.257 million) in FY 2024–25, which is a 19.53% rise. And the average daily ticket bookings grew by 11.85% in the same period. And 86.38% of total reserved ticket bookings on Indian Railways is now through E-Ticketing.
The official website for booking e-tickets online for Indian Railways trains is the IRCTC website https://www.irctc.co.in, and they offer booking apps for mobile devices too.
- Post by Ashwini Vaishnaw @AshwiniVaishnaw on X. 9:27 PM · Jun 4, 2025
- Indian Railways Cracks Down on Unauthorized Automated Bookings; Boosts Website Access for Genuine Users - Ministry of Railways, Posted On: 04 JUN 2025 3:54PM by PIB Delhi.