The rush for bus tickets preceding the holiday season seems to have overwhelmed the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC), which is struggling to keep its servers online.
Since December 19, numerous tour operators have reported that they could not connect to the KSRTC website. This, said Khan Patel, president of the KSRTC Franchisee’s Association, had seen a “drastic” reduction in the business for the nearly 750 franchisees operating from across the State and in the neighbouring States. Nearly 150 of such operators are based out of Bengaluru.
“In some cases, 90 per cent of the business has been hit. This has been a problem over the past five days. We have taken up the matter with the KSRTC and have demanded that they upgrade their servers,” he said on Tuesday.
Ravishankar, a franchisee at Kaggadasapura here, said he had seen a reduction in ticket bookings of up to 50 per cent, barely selling 25 tickets daily now. “What used to take one minute, now takes about half an hour. Very few customers will wait for that long,” he said.
Similarly, Venkatesh from Koramangala said while e-tickets — booked through customer logins — had been coming irregularly, the distribution of counter tickets — given by the KSRTC to agents — had stalled.
For the KSRTC, the issues started due to the aggregation of a number of technical and non-technical problems. Since December 16, the State road transport corporation has been updating the software on its website, which has led to slowing down or partial closure of the e-booking and mobile booking applications, said Umesh Babu, Chief Manager (Marketing), KSRTC.
Compounding matters was a mass message sent by the e-governance department informing customers of a new mobile booking platform. “Many who got the message, attempted to test out the application. This overloaded the server,” he said.
The servers in the KSRTC are designed to take 3,000 users at a time, and the maximum tested on it was 13,000 during the Dasara rush.
While admitting the problems existed for a few days, Rajender Kumar Kataria, Managing Director, KSRTC, said the system had now been upgraded. “The load has been increased to 50,000 bookings a day. The revenue now has returned to about Rs. 2 crore a day, and we won’t be having online issues,” he said.
