The whole point of having such a weird system is to make it "difficult" for you to book a ticket. Think about the "common man" standing in a queue for 4-8 hrs trying to book that ticket when you could ideally book using your coolest newest gadget in seconds. Now that would cause a riot at the railway station booth. In Indian you never have enough resources available for the 1.3 billion people. So everything is rationed, including the online train tickets. It's like the IIT's or IIM's conducting the world's toughest entrance examinations only to select a statistically insignificant 1% of the applicants. Great Indian politics demands badly run government services. Private services are still banned in a number of areas including private universities, public transportation, power, Aeronautics ....