Sanjay Aggarwal is General Manager of Operations at IRCTC and is the brain behind the tremendous success of online ticketing system behind the Indian Railways. IRCTC has gotten into the record books as the largest e-commerce transactions. They book 10 million passengers daily.
He stressed that IRCTC’s main interest is in selling more tickets online. He mentioned that digital payments are important to IRCTC as much as air and water is important to a human being’s survival.
He walked us to the humble beginnings of IRCTC. Eight years ago they started selling tickets online as a way to reduce the burden on the physical sales counters in Railway stations. The idea was also to save money as it cuts down on manpower. Booking online is certainly less hassle-free than booking through counters even though its not a perfect system.
They started with credit cards but soon realized that they hit glass wall. The number of credit card penetration in India was less which directly impacted the growth of IRCTC. They then tied up with 15 banks which made the customer base much wider.
However, in order to expand even further and reach people who may not own a credit card or a bank account, they started to tie up with prepaid financial cards. Today prepaid card business constitutes nearly 15% biz. That’s more than a million passenger tickets booked each day using prepaid cards like ITz Cash.
They launched rolling deposit scheme to help in real rural areas. They opened 150000 outlets in most of the 6000 villages so that villages can pay cash and get tickets. This has greatly helped in increasing the revenues.
