The procedure to book a ticket on IRCTC is quite simple, you create a user name and password on the IRCTC.com site and enter the required information as in the to journey, from journey and the date of commencement of the journey. Along with this information, one needs to enter the type of ticket he wants to book as in General or Tatkal. In general category the ticket price is less and earlier the booking used to start 2 months from the date of journey but recently that has been increased to 4 months. And the other option is Tatkal where you can book the ticket one day prior to the date of journey but by paying the additional cost to the railways.
Now the irony about the above mentioned information is, how can one plan his/her journey 4 months in advance when most of our journey is not leisure in India rather a requirement to reach certain destination to attend the occasion.
What people generally do is they book the ticket online through www.irctc.co.in in general category from different destinations as there is a fixed quota of seats for the given destination; However, a person is given a waiting confirmation which becomes invalid if the booking is not confirmed on the other hand the ticket that has been taken from the window or a physical ticket is more reliable and permits you can board the train even when your ticket is in the waiting list, No one really understands the logic of this confusion that has been created by IRCTC, may be its time for the railways to look into the matter and fix the issue to allow more efficient, fluent and robust system in place for everyone to reach everywhere in time without creating a fuzz of their experience in the Indian railway system.
Now the irony about the above mentioned information is, how can one plan his/her journey 4 months in advance when most of our journey is not leisure in India rather a requirement to reach certain destination to attend the occasion.
What people generally do is they book the ticket online through www.irctc.co.in in general category from different destinations as there is a fixed quota of seats for the given destination; However, a person is given a waiting confirmation which becomes invalid if the booking is not confirmed on the other hand the ticket that has been taken from the window or a physical ticket is more reliable and permits you can board the train even when your ticket is in the waiting list, No one really understands the logic of this confusion that has been created by IRCTC, may be its time for the railways to look into the matter and fix the issue to allow more efficient, fluent and robust system in place for everyone to reach everywhere in time without creating a fuzz of their experience in the Indian railway system.