People outside India may not realize the importance of train tickets and how difficult they can be to book. Trains are still the primary mode of transport for long distance travel and some routes get booked out in minutes after reservations open. There have been ticket mafias who mass book tickets and resell them in the black market for a huge profit.
I do appreciate that the developer was solving a genuine need, so kudos to him. But anyone from India could've seen the government's reaction coming a mile away.
Tatkal tickets are special tickets that are opened two days before date of travel at 9 in morning. These are important tickets as a last chance for some urgent travel because usually trains are full long back. To prevent abuse there are lots of restrictions, including not available on any third party.
It was a lame app that prefilled the form in Railway app and charged money for this feature. This must have triggered some TnC breach. Similar things exist as browser plugin/scripts, but they are free and stay under the radar.
His punishment should have been to work with the Indian Railway to design a better system that meets their requirements & their customers’ needs as equitably as possible.
so let me get this correct for non indians here. a stupid ass government website for booking railway tickets which is the opposite of intuitive, crashes daily, has pathetic captcha and has all sorts of glitches. if facebook can handle a billion users on a daily basis, why cant the irctc website. in 2020 this unacceptable.
coming on to the guy here, >Developing an unauthorised software bypassing e-ticketing system is an offence. Such applications defeated the purpose of having a first-come-first-serve system and benefit only a few who use the software
so why not have this functionality in the first party website in the first place?
>However, railway officials clarified Yuvrajaa bypassed the railway system and made money illegally which is a crime. He wasn’t event an authorized agent registered with IRCTC to book tickets.
did this guy take a users money, buy a ticket on his behalaf and get a commission from the railways? no. from the customer? no. all he did was make a fucking autohotkey for their website. he charged 20 rupees, thats USD $ 0.30 for hosting the service, paying for the upkeep. any of his non customers who were disadvantaged because of his service, well no shit. go and ask the government to fix their website and bring it in parity with this guy
look. this guy automated typing, refreshing, probably even bypassing captchas. on that note, why should this be "illegal" to do automation? just because they say in Tnc's? grow a pair. why should the government rate limit customers by shoving captchas?
i had the misfortune of buying a couple of tickets back in june 20 or july was it for some relatives. that was the most agonizing time of my life. random refreshes, logouts, not being able to do multiple logins, having an actual monthly limit on the number of tickets you can buy in a month, the payment failed 4 times. i had to borrow money twice because the payment was deducted but credit not given. refund was sanctioned after 15 days AFTER a deduction of Rs. 2500 i think USD $ 40.
if i had used this guys service, i would have been glad to pay him 10 times over because the service which should have been promised by the first party itself IRCTC was in 1990's.
>regulations.
such a bs word in india. why doesnt the railway make their website like a 2020 website which does automation, remembers your shit, allows instant payment and refund, this and that
I can't figure out if it was just "pasting fields into the UI" as they say (in which case how were they caught with traffic monitoring???) or if it was a screen scraper
In any case, he clearly wasn't collecting ticket payments on behalf of the train company, so I don't see how they could accuse him of acting as an unauthorised agent
Something pretty similar happened in the US with Ticketmaster. https://www.wired.com/2010/11/wiseguys-plead-guilty/
Skyscanner for Amtrak in the U.S. sounds like a great idea.
Flagged, please do not editorialize titles...
Sounds like what would happen anywhere in the world if you make an unauthorized booking app for anything...
IMO Give this developer a ticket to the next ycombinator batch.
Don't know how likely that is given the current US stance on immigration, but he clearly has the initiative, even if his app is not welcome.
He did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_rigging type of booking app
Looks like both the railways and the developer have never heard of APIs.
The headline has been editorialized. While I don't agree with what the authorities did here, and believe the developer was acting in good faith, the developer created an app for buying railway tickets which charged a small fee for the tickets - the issue was that he was arrested for making money off ticket sales, as opposed to "automating forms on a website"