Overview
- A student at MNIT Jaipur raised the CAPTCHA issue during a June 11 interaction, and Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw immediately called officials and set a 30-day deadline for a new IRCTC website.
- Vaishnaw’s July 15 commitment covers the IRCTC web portal only and does not include any confirmed mobile app update.
- Users have long reported specific failures during peak bookings such as repeated CAPTCHA checks, delayed OTPs, payment failures, session timeouts and site slowdowns that block Tatkal reservations.
- Indian Railways plans a separate, larger PRS overhaul starting in August that officials say will boost booking capacity to about 1.5 lakh tickets per minute and raise enquiry throughput dramatically, while recent account-cleanup measures removed roughly 2.5 crore suspicious IRCTC IDs.
- The 30-day timeline could require user re‑verification and risks service instability during migration, so passengers are being advised to secure account details and avoid critical bookings on or immediately after the launch date.