New Delhi, Mar 2 (PTI and Online Bureau): Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corp (IRCTC) booked more than 500,000 railway e-tickets on Friday, surpassing the earlier one-day sales record set in July last year.

IRCTC booked 5.02 lakh e-tickets, crossing the earlier figure of 4.96 lakh e-tickets booked on July 7 last year, an IRCTC official said.

The record, he said, comes at a time when the IRCTC is facing criticism of its website failing to cope up with the peak hour rush for Tatkal bookings and during festive season.

Over the past few years, IRCTC’s ticketing site had become the target of jokes in social media for its delays.

IRCTC had recently invested Rs 3.5 crore in improving the efficiency of the website and Rs 3 crore in augmenting the software licenses and storage area network.

The system is now being upgraded with more powerful Hexa Core servers (with 64GB RAM) from the earlier Dual Core servers (with 8GB RAM), which is costing nearly Rs 4 crore, the official said.

“With this investment/upgradation, we are hopeful to achieve around 40-45 per cent increase in the booking during the Tatkal hours,” he said.

At present, the e-ticketing site books around 48 per cent of the total reserved tickets on the Indian Railways network.

Railway Minister Pawan Bansal, in his budget speech, had announced plans to enable the IRCTC site to handle bookings of 7,200 tickets per minute from its present around 2,000 tickets.

He had declared that the site, expected to be ready by the year-end, would be able to handle 1.2 lakh users at any point as compared to its existing capacity of 40,000 users.