Tracking the Wrong Things

November 2, 2026 · Essay, India

Everyone has run into a version of this: a good that everyone wants but not everyone can get. US visa appointments are one. Tatkal train tickets in India are another. These are constrained resources, overbooked by demand, and the usual mechanism to distribute them is to control access - prevent it, slow it down, make it hard, or limit how many units one user can buy.

The implementation takes different forms. On a website you get rate limited. If you have to go there physically, you stand in a queue and first in the queue wins. These are all ways of imposing a set of rules that seem fair - fair the way courts deal when they distribute constrained resources. It can be US visa appointments visa numbers under a quota or ticket bookings in India.

The trains themselves are cheap for the journey they provide. On the Hyderabad to Bokaro Steel City route I take, train 17007 does the roughly 1480 km in about 27 hours, and the fare is what makes the constraint obvious:

That is a coveted resource. Useful, underpriced relative to what it provides, and everyone wants it. It is normal to want to allocate it well, and the government comes in to ensure fair and equal distribution so the rich do not scoop up all of it - the same instinct that produced the reservation system in education institutions, which also ends up breaking the very outcome it was meant to protect Bad Metrics Bad Outcomes.

The mechanism used for Tatkal is practically broken. The statement it runs on is: “hey, you cannot automate it, so that everyone has a fair chance.” Those two parts do not make sense together, because people are anyway automating it. The moment you start controlling access to a coveted good, a black market emerges, and the black market beats anything.

For Tatkal there is a black market of people who will do this automation for you. They have to do it on a small scale so they do not get caught by the rules - the government can threaten and catch them under whatever policies it has, but only at scale, and the operators know it. Are they doing anything wrong? There is a technical gap in the tool and in the IRCTC website, and these folks are just bridging the gap and taking their cut - or sometimes not even taking a cut, because so much of it exists as open source. shivamguys/irctc-cypress-automation is a Cypress script that books Tatkal and normal tickets on the IRCTC website in under a minute, captcha included, and it already sits at 329 stars and 630 forks on GitHub.

This is out there already. The government can put in as many rules as it wants, but it cannot catch people who are doing it on a small scale, for themselves or for ten people.

It is like nuclear weapons. You can put the rules in, but everyone is doing it secretly, because they need to do it to get the thing done. It is just too slow to fix the government or to fix the systems, so people bypass the system by whatever means they have, and that creates perverse incentives Incentive Structures. The government takes the moral high ground - it has put out notices asking people not to do a certain thing - but it has not solved the problem.

And the end customer, the person for whom the rules were written, still does not get the tickets. Some players in the market are automating anyway, so the tickets are automated regardless. Tatkal is no longer a tatkal thing. It is just booked, right now, at 10:00.

If the government were being fair, it could also send out the data on which people are booking these tickets and what mechanisms they use to do it. Lack of transparency is just a way to shrug off accountability Lack Of Accountability.

This is the same shape as bioweapon engineering - the rumored kind during COVID - or nuclear weaponization: every country wants the weapon so it has it when needed, but under policy it is not allowed to build it, so the government says the right thing without actually solving the problem.

Government websites are a great proxy for showing how well they perform, and how well they perform is a great proxy for understanding how much a government really cares for its citizens - not the words, not the media version of how much they care. Right now the IRCTC booking process is completely broken, and that does not send out a positive message.