Techie breaks Railway site Captcha
By Sati

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited website Irctc.co.in is one of the most popular portals in the country.  Irctc offers online rail ticket bookings, train schedules, travel planner and even many holiday packages. Not surprisingly, it is a huge money spinner. According to Alexa, it is among the top 30 websites in India and top 600 sites in the world.

Since its inception, Irctc had its share of problems and critics.  Many ordinary Indians complained about it being extremely slow at some times and unavailable during certain times in the morning. There was talk that some travel agents were getting preferential treatment at the cost of ordinary Indians. Recently, one of India’s most highly regarded Cyber Law experts Naavi had written an eloquent article about how IRCTC could be improved.

Yesterday, Techgoss received an anonymous tip about a software professional Varunkumar from Hyderabad, India who has proudly announced a script which fellow techies (and people with a certain level of tech knowledge) can use to fast track and partially automate the booking process.  His script also keeps your net connection to Irctc ‘alive’ and it also bypasses the Captcha. Captcha was implemented to ensure that only human beings and not spam robotic processes log in.

This work around would allow people with technical knowledge an edge over the ordinary Indians. When Varunkumar contacted Indian Railways to tell them how he had broken their Captcha and how it could be fixed, the Railways Department ignored him.

Super techie Varunkumar Nagarajan is a Hyderabad based Software Engineer who started blogging in 2006. Varunkumar blogged

“
Scripting always excites me. Being the big GreaseMonkey fan that I am, I have written many scripts to customize the streets I roam around on the web. I have posted few of them here. This is one of the best and most useful scripts I have written so far. The script is primarily for the Indian readers who use Indian Railways for their transportation. It is to enhance the ticket booking experience on the IRCTC web site. Using this, one can *book tickets without having to type a single word of text* on the IRCTC web site (Of course, not considering the billing details). Let me explain the cool things which can be done using the script.

Features

•Global settings page. A page which accepts the details of the travel, train details and the passenger details. These details will be saved on the browser and it will be auto-populated in the appropriate places during the ticket booking progress.
•Login Management. Whenever the session times out or you are asked to re-type the password, the script will take care of logging you back to the site.
•Availability details on the list of trains. On the train search result page, the script will add an additional column for showing the availability on each of the listed trains. This is a very useful feature. This feature was taken from the older version of a similar script written by Sharath and Nitin.
•Auto-filling the train details on “Plan my Travel” and the “Quick Book” page.
•Auto-filling the passenger details on Ticket booking page and the “Quick Book” page.
•Captcha is broken. IRCTC has recently introduced Captcha to their ticket booking process. It is very annoying and also the image generation seems to be very slow. I have broken the Captcha and there is no need to enter those crazy letters on the image.
•Keep Alive. The script which I had written few months ago has been integrated into this script. If the ‘Keep Alive’ option is enabled from the settings page, the script will keep the session active from 07:30 AM to 08:00 AM for Tatkal booking.
•Button to swap the stations ‘From’ and ‘To’. This again was built by Sharath.
•No annoying ads.
“

What is particularly interesting in this blog post is how this bright young techie worked out the Captcha of the sometimes slow Railway website.  Even though for Varunkumar this was an intellectual exercise to help colleagues, friends and readers of his blog,  what if some travel agents misuse his script on a large scale basis to get a big edge over many ordinary Indians who don’t even own a computer and travel to cyber cafes to make their booking.

IRCTC needs to evaluate all such input so it can offer a better experience to Indian consumers.

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