IRCTC is one of the India’s most popular website for two reasons:
- It’s popular because this is the easiest way to book daily tickets from home.
- This site mostly doesn’t work at the peek hour (Tatkal booking time).
The second point is based on my personal experience, as mostly 10 A.M., when tatkal booking starts, most of the time IRCTC site stops responding for hours. In the past, IRCTC team have made enough announcement about uplifting the site capacity, but that time is still awaited. To ease the pain out of frustrated Indian railway travellers who are using IRCTC site to book railway tickets in India, IRCTC team have launched a new service call eWallet.
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What is IRCTC eWallet service and how it works?
Think of eWallet service as money bank for your IRCTC account. You can deposit any amount from 100-5000INR, and you can use this amount to book your railway tickets. This will save your time on paying with credit card, net banking or other online payment method. More over, if in future you cancel your IRCTC ticket, refund can happen on the next day if you are using eWallet service. This service is available for every IRCTC user, but you need to activate it to use it. There is one time fees of INR250 to active IRCTC eWallet feature, and it requires you to have a Pan card to activate the feature.
To activate this service, login to your IRCTC account and under dashboard, you will see an option for eWallet registration. You need to add your PAN Card number and Card holder’s first name to move to next step.
On the next page, you need to select a transaction password, which you will be using every time when you book a ticket using IRCTC site. Now select the payment method and pay INR 250 to activate your eWallet service.
After making the payment, you will get successfully registration message. Once your registration is complete, you will also get an Email. In my case I had to logout and login again from IRCTC website to see new fields “eWallet Deposits”, “eWallet transactions”. Now click on eWallet deposits, and add money to your IRCTC account.
I have added 4000 INR into my account, and now I can use it anytime in future to purchase railway ticket. For frequent travellers, this service is going to be very useful but again I find 5000 INR to be too less limit for frequent travellers.
Here are few notable features of IRCTC eWallet:
- This service is completely free but you need to pay INR 250 to activate the service.
- Helps in faster booking, as payment will be quicker.
- Minimum deposit amount is 100 and maximum is INR5000.
- On ticket cancellation, refund will be added into account on the next day for eWallet users.
- Transaction password feature for added security.
- The only sad part of eWallet service is, it will not be available from 8A.M. to 12P.M.
Overall as an IRCTC customer, I find this feature to be very handy and useful. I hope that in future we get to see a faster and more powerful version of IRCTC site, for now eWallet is indeed a good move. Do let me know about your view on eWallet service and do you find it useful?