Why Indian Railways passengers may soon have to bid goodbye to IRCTC; details here
Say goodbye to the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC)! Railway Minister Piyush Goyal is of the view that IRCTC is not a ‘catchy’ name for the e-ticketing organisation of Indian Railways. He has therefore asked IRCTC to come up with a new name for the organisation! At a recent event, Piyush Goyal said that he finds it difficult to remember IRCTC’s name and has asked officials to come up with a new and interesting name that is also easy to remember! Confirming the same to Financial Express Online, an IRCTC official said, “The Minister has asked us to suggest alternative names to IRCTC. We are awaiting directions from the Railway Board on how to go about renaming the organisation. It will be a long-drawn process as the new name will have to be registered as well.”
Incidentally, a few months ago a contest on Narendra Modi government’s mygov.in portal had run a contest to rename IRCTC. The contest, which is now closed, invited people to participate in ‘COIN A NEW NAME’ on the mygov.in website. The competition also offered a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh for the selected entry. According to the mygov.in website, as many as 1,852 people across the country participated in the competition and submitted their responses. The competition was only opened for Indian Nationals and results in only English and Hindi language were accepted. The deadline to submit the responses was 31 March, 2018, however, the results for the competition have not been announced IRCTC till now. The IRCTC official that FE Online spoke to said that no directions have been received on whether the new name will be decided from these entries or not.
The official website of IRCTC, irctc.co.in, is used by lakhs of railway passengers to book tickets. Earlier this year, the next-generation e-ticketing website underwent a significant revamp, with several new passenger-friendly measures being introduced. Data suggests that the official IRCTC website has nearly 3 crore registered users.
What remains to be seen is that after the name change, will the IRCTC e-ticketing website and other websites associated with the catering and tourism arm also get a new domain name.