Awful system ? yes, but a massively scaled. think about the scale of the system. One single backend is serving kiosks at thousands of railway stations, lakhs of booking counters and several agent terminals. True that there are downtimes and slowness - but consider this system as a classic usecase and study of how massive a system can be. The student who wrote this rant just talks about the downsides and how bad the whole system is. I would appreciate a few ideas on how he in his great might would do to fix this massive system. Are there any constructive ideas in this article ? do we learn from this article ? It is very easy to rant about everything...if you don't like my views and downvote my comment, you are free to do so.