Now, IRCTC will predict your wait-listed tickets will get confirmed or not

While you may not get confirmed berths each time you book a train ticket, you can find out if your ticket stands a chance of being confirmed thanks to a new predictive service on the IRCTC website, officials said on Monday. At midnight, the new and refurbished IRCTC website went live; and now, it will let Indian Railways passengers know the probability of confirmation of wait-listed tickets based on a new algorithm developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).

"According to the new feature of wait-list prediction, one can predict the chances of a wait-listed or a RAC ticket getting confirmed on the basis of booking trends. We will mine our own data of passenger operations and booking patterns for the first time," a senior official in the Railway Ministry said.

The idea, the officials said, came from Railway Minister Piyush Goyal, who had given a one-year deadline last year to complete the process of inducting the predictive service on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website.

The algorithm will take into account the past 13 years' data to arrive at a "robust, workable model", the officials said.

While predictions have been used by private players, the officials said that the Indian Railways system would be more reliable as it would have the advantage of the database of the national transporter.

Nearly 1.3 million tickets are booked on the IRCTC website every day against a reserved accommodation of 1.05 million berths, the officials said.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC)