BENGALURU: Two engineering students, one from IIT have built an application that uses a specific algorithm to find out alternative routes for booking confirmed train tickets, reports Business Insider India.

Runal Jaju, a second year IIT Kharagpur student has developed the ‘Ticket Jugaad’ app together with his cousin Shubham Baldava, a NIT Jamshedpur student, who worked on the coding section for the app.

The app's co-developer Runal Jaju told Press Trust of India (PTI), “There are some station-wise quotas for ticket booking. For example if you are booking a ticket from station A, it might show waiting list but when you book it from a previous station you might get the ticket. If you try to find out such stations manually it becomes tough but our app has automated this.” 

This app being supported by Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT, has recently won the first prize of 1.5 lakh in Annual Global Business Model Competition at IIT Kharagpur.

The twenty year old engineering student said, “What we do is to provide you with all the possible permutations and combinations to cover the maximum part of your journey.” “Some ticket agents are experts in manually calculating such combinations to find seats but they charge a hefty fee from passengers,” he added.

The app idea crossed Jaju’s mind during his travel from Kharagpur in West Bengal to Aurangabad, his home town in Maharashtra.

“When I went to the website to book tickets it showed waiting list while when I boarded the train it had few empty seats. They were left unutilized despite a huge demand and so I thought of solving this problem by using technology,” Jaju said. 

The app has partnered with Cleartrip, an online travel agency to book tickets and can be downloaded free of cost.

Only on the android OS, the application has witnessed more than 5,000 downloads within one month of its launch. This app will be released on website and Apple’s iOS soon.

“We will never have ads on our platform. To raise revenue we will try to get a license for booking the tickets from our app,” he said. “We are trying to expand our services gradually,” he added.

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