The Indian internet industry is growing faster than the regional average, albeit helped by a lower base to start with.  There are a lot of success stories in the ecommerce space, but the leader of pack is an unlikely contender. It is the Indian railways -  set up in 1853 and with all the trappings of a large government owned enterprise, it was off the block with a rail ticket booking website in 2003. This website now books over 200,000 tickets a day (out of a total of over 860,000 tickets daily) making it the largest e-commerce website in India, generating around $80mn of revenues every month. In India, it is ranked the number 1 website by visitor volumes as well in the travel space and rank 21 overall.

Indian railways made its API available last year to select licensed OTAs which has led to a lot of activity in this space. Leading online travel players were off the block quickly with Thomas Cook,  Makemytrip and Cleartrip launching their train booking platforms based on the API last year. OTAs earn only a booking fee and a chance to cross-sell their products to the rail ticket buyers. These developments will increase the penetration of the internet even further.The customers benefits from some usability and feature based innovation. At the end of the day, the rail booking system seems like a win-win for all involved.

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