The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is planning to make Aadhaar card mandatory for its user registration process for e-ticketing. This will ensure that users registering on the IRCTC web site are properly identified of their identity and address through the Aadhaar card number verification.
However, if implemented, this move may go against the Supreme Court’s ruling that Aadhaar card is not compulsory and officials who insist on them will be taken to task for violation of its interim order in September 2013 that “no person should suffer for not getting the Aadhaar card, in spite of the fact that some authority had issued a circular making it mandatory”.
In a related move, IRCTC has decided to ramp up its e-ticketing operations by hiring the services of Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) for conducting the security audit of its Next Generation E-Ticketing System. As part of this, STQC will conduct the web application security and vulnerability assessment of servers and devices that are part of its e-ticketing operations hosted at irctc.co.in. The STQC Directorate is an attached office of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.