Booking a Tatkal train ticket could soon require more than just quick fingers. Reports suggest that the Indian Railways is gearing up to make e-Aadhaar verification mandatory for all Tatkal bookings made on the IRCTC platform. The rollout is expected by the end of June.
The biggest shake-up? Only Aadhaar-verified users may be allowed to book tickets in the first 10 minutes of the Tatkal booking window—a period considered critical for snagging high-demand seats. Even authorised booking agents are likely to be locked out during this time.
A Gazette notification dated May 27, 2025, has already cleared the deck for Aadhaar-based verification. It states that the Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) can use Aadhaar authentication—on a voluntary basis for now—to establish the identity of railway staff and passengers via either Yes/No or eKYC.
But multiple sources suggest this may soon become mandatory for Tatkal ticket bookings, transforming how millions of users access urgent railway reservations.
This push comes on the back of a massive clean-up by IRCTC. Over 2.5 crore user IDs have been deactivated recently—many linked to fraudulent bookings or bot-based systems. An internal audit revealed that in just five minutes after bookings opened, nearly 2.9 lakh suspicious PNRs had been generated, most under general and Tatkal quotas.
Between January and May 2025, IRCTC flagged 6,800+ disposable email domains, placed another 20 lakh accounts under scrutiny, and filed 134 cybercrime complaints—a clear sign that abuse of the system had become rampant.
IRCTC says its success ratio—the percentage of ticket attempts that result in confirmed bookings—has risen from 43.1% in October 2024 to 62.2% in May 2025. Still, many users feel that third-party platforms, scripts, and booking agents continue to have an edge over individual passengers.
There’s cautious optimism, but trust remains fragile.
For many, especially those not tech-savvy or those without Aadhaar-linked IRCTC accounts, the shift could add friction to an already stressful booking process. But for the Railways, it's a step towards restoring fairness in a system long plagued by automation abuse.
Whether this new system makes bookings smoother or simply shifts the challenge elsewhere is something only time—and the next Tatkal window—will reveal.
