"Ticket Jugaad" App by IIT and NIT Students

Indian way of “Jugaad” is used almost everywhere and the most usage of this “jugaad” is in trains when one does not get confirmed seats but the trip is necessary so what to do, of course “Jugaad”.

To solve this problem of “Jugaad” two students came up with an app “Ticket Jugaad” one of them is from IIT, launched a mobile app which helps find out alternative routes for getting seats in train. “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,” the app’s co-developer Runal Jaju told PTI.

Jaju is a second yearIIT Kharagpur student and his cousin Shubham Baldava, who studies inNIT Jamshedpur.

The start-up won the first prize of Rs 1.5 lakh in IIT Kharagpur’s Annual Global Business Model Competition recently.

“What we do is to provide you with all the possible permutations and combinations to cover the maximum part of your journey,” the 20-year-old engineering student said. Jaju said some ticket agents are experts in manually calculating such combinations to find seats but they charge a hefty fee from passengers.

The app is completely free and easy to use but is only available for android users. It will soon be available for the IOS users too. This app automatically finds available tickets starting from stations before or after the source station to provide passengers the maximum path that can be covered with a confirmed ticket.

“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 unutilised despite a huge demand and so I thought of solving this problem by using technology,” Jaju said. He then contacted his cousin, a computer science student in NIT, who did the coding part for the app.