Indian developer jailed for making unauthorized train ticket booking app

Yes. thats because technically thats what he seems to have done. Since tatkal tickets are limited in number, by prefilling and automating the forms he effectively helps his clients jump the queue. This is a clear hack, but I find it irrational to arrest a person because the website is suboptimal and cannot prevent his hack from running. This similar to what Github did when they pulled down youtube-dl, bully your way to compliance.

I think This is a very naïve, unfair take on one of the world's most sophisticated, complex, real-time booking systems that is unparalleled in what it enables. [1,2]

The front end definitely can be much much better; but the issue is very simply there are not enough tickets to match the demand.

"From 29 tickets booked in a day in 2002, it has reached to 13 Lakh tickets a day as of now. It is reported that the IRCTC system is currently capable of booking 15K tickets a minute online and can handle 3 Lakh concurrent users to handle any surge in demand." [1] (13 lakhs is 1.3 million)

"Of the 15 million passengers who climb aboard one of 8,520 trains each day, about 550,000 have reserved accommodations. Their journeys can start in any part of India and end in any other part, with travel times as long as 48 hours and distances up to several thousand kilometres. The challenge is to provide a reservation system that can support such a huge number-regardless of whether it’s measured by kilometres, passenger numbers, routing complexity, or simply the sheer scale of country. " [2]

If anyone has better references on the frankly astounding technical accomplishment that the CRIS Passenger Reservation system, please share.

"Passenger Reservation System (PRS): A nationwide online passenger reservation and ticketing system, developed and maintained by CRIS, was developed in C and Fortran on a Digital OpenVMS operating system using RTR (Reliable Transaction Router) as middleware. Also known as CONCERT (Country-wide Network of Computerised Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing), it interconnects the four regional computing systems (in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai) into a national PRS grid. It allows a passenger anywhere to book train tickets from any station to any station. PRS handles reservations, changes, cancellations and refunds, reserving over 1.6 million seats and berths daily. Complex rules, validations and fare-computation techniques are interwoven in the application" [3]

[1] https://inc42.com/features/how-online-train-booking-ticket-p...

[2] http://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/25869/1/Unit-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Railway_Information...

Some context here:

Indian railways website is very slow and pathetic (so bad that there are lengthy discussion on HN about it. search for IRCTC).

Given the shortage of tickets thousands of people try to book tickets at 7am when the window to book a certain class of tickets call `Tatkal` opens. Thousands of people are trying to book the exact same tickets from say 7am and by 7:10 am all tickets get sold out.

Now, if you could prefill all the forms and just press submit you might be able to buy the tickets before others. Railways website specifically tries to not allow any kind of pre-filling. The app merely bypasses that restriction. (I have written scripts in past to do just that when I lived there).

Railways is a classic colonial government system and operates pretty much as if India is still a British colony. They have their own police force called RPF which arrested the boy under Railways act 1989 for “unauthorised business of procuring and supplying railway tickets” which the boy did not do at all. Not to mention, the railways form has a captcha so it was not even a programmatic submission. There are railways mafias in India who buy tickets by bribing railways staff and I suspect these people are responsible for getting this boy jailed as his solution helped more genuine passengers to book their tickets by undercutting the "agents".

It remains to be seen how the courts apply the standard here but it will probably take around 10-15 years for the courts to come to a verdict.

Personal Rant: When I was in India, I had the misfortune of relying on Indian railways to travel home from college. I was so pissed that I was determined to get out of India so I have to never deal with Indian railways. I had tried all possible ways to hack the booking system and had my own chrome extensions to fill up the forms.

> frankly astounding technical accomplishment that the CRIS Passenger Reservation system

Believe me, I know well the complexities involved in developing computerised reservation systems, but I'm not sure what is astounding about this - it's what every CRS does. 550k bookings a day is nothing extraordinary

India has a strong legal framework and unfortunately very poor implementation (the arrest is an example of poor implementation/bullying by the state). When you say illegal, you should be able to specify the law under which it is illegal.

Broadly classifying anything not convenient to the state as illegal does not stand ground, AFAIK there is no law which prohibits automation of forms on any website?