IRCTC - Settlement Requested

How to get refund from IRCTC for failed transaction?

IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited) is a Government of India Enterprise that offers online booking of rail tickets in India. Everyday hundreds of thousands of people book their tickets using internet via IRCTC. IRCTC offers a variety of payment methods for online ticket reservation.

I have booked many tickets using IRCTC in the past. But last week i booked bulk tickets for my friends for a goa trip. I used my Karur Vysya Bank Debit card for payment. IRCTC offers a number of payment gateways powered by CITI bank, HDFC bank, Axis Bank etc.

Amount Debited from account and Ticket not booked, what happened? Can i get a refund.

Online payment is a complex process that involves a number of stages. Your ticket will be booked successfully if only all the stages are completed. If a stage fails in the process your ticket will not be booked. For example if you give wrong CCV number / expiration date your payment via Credit card / debit card will not complete. In that case a Settlement Failed entry will be posted in Refund Status of Failed Transaction in My Transactions section of your IRCTC account. This part will have S.nO, Transaction ID, Pay Status (settlement failed/settlement requested), Reservation status, Total Amount and Bank.

If settlement Failed is shown you can ignore it as no amount is debited from your account. In case amount is debited from your account and no ticket is booked a 'settlement requested' status will be shown. In that case IRCTC will refund your amount in few days.

What to do? Whom to contact to get the refund? Should i contact IRCTC or my Bank?

Don't worry. Your amount will be refunded automatically to your bank account in 4-5 working days. Check your account statement in 4-5 days.

I got an email indicating that my payment was refunded. The following is the email i got from IRCTC

The refund of Rs. for the transaction tried by you under reference no.xxxxxxxx which has failed and later found that the payment has been debited to your credit card account has been credited to your card account at 30-Nov-2010 .
We suggest you to please retry the transaction, if not booked already. The booked tickets history can be checked to view the list of all tickets booked by you.
Warm regards,

So don't panic if amount is debited and no ticket is booked in IRCTC website.

Sundar's Diwali Wishes

Festival of lights or Festival of frights. I started hating Diwali for the past few years. What is good in firing crackers, wearing new cloths and eating bellyfull meals, if you are unkind towards fellow humans. People are rushing madly to cloth shops, sweets shops, electronics, mobile other shops to purchase goods in discounts, offers, freebies etc. Especially middle class people are bound to this disease. Family head / Father / Husband suffers a lot for the greeds of their wives and children. Children too are addicted to this mania. We can forgive the children since they are too young to understand the reality.


In a poor country like India there is great disparity of Income among people. Some families earn as low as Rs. 100 per day while some biggies earn as much as hundreds of thousands of rupess per day. While this is not uncommon in countries where capitalism rules, in India the situation is different. The gap between poor, middle class and rich is very big. The job opportunities in IT, BPO and servcie sectors have helped middle class youths to realize their dreams. Five figure income is not uncommon for Indian Middle class. While the middle class is flourishing from the economic boom the former backbones of Indian economy, agriculture and allied sectors have seen downfalls. This has resulted in poverty in millions of families.

The government of India has taken no steps to improve the quality of life for rural Indians. Politicians and officials are busy harvesting money from many scams. The recent commonwealth games are evidence that more than half of the Government machinery is corrupt. There is another important news about the functioning of this machinery. The Food Corporation of India stocks food grains in numerous godowns across the country. The recent findings have shown that hundreds of thousands of these food grains are rotting in the godowns of the FCI due to inadequate storage facilities. A pulblic litigation was heard by the high court bench and the judges recommended the government the food grains free of cost to the thousands of poor and hungry people. The minister of the concerned department promptly denied the judges recommendations. He would not allow the food to be supplied free of cost to the dying fellow Indians. Still he will take thousands of Indian Ruppee as salary, hundreds of thousands of rupees as allowance, millions of rupess as bribe, bank accounts in switzerland and other luxuries free of cost. He is not willing to give any piece of bread to the starving fellow Indian.

Such is the condition of Indian Mindset today. We have become very greedy, jealous and selfish. This selfishness starts from the individual. Indians especially Tamils were examples of hospitality and kind heart. But that was a thing of past. The western education has corrupted the minds of Indian youths to the level that it is too late to reverse. The joint family structre is no more available. After marriage the girls wants to immediately seperate their husbands and start a new family. There is no understanding between in-laws. No understanding between wife and her mother-in-law. Educated women prefer nuclear family. This is the first sign of selfishness. This is my family, my child, my husband. I want nobody else in my life. That is the mindset of modern indian women. This collective minset will lead to nothing but chaos. These people loose affection for parents and ultimately the parents are left in homes for orphans. The same thing will happen to them in few years when they become old.