# Indian Railways to replace 40-year-old PRS with 5x faster cloud system 2026-08-12T00:52:18+00:00 | Governance | Indian Opinion Desk Corroboration: 1 independent outlet Indian Railways is replacing its nearly 40-year-old Passenger Reservation System with a cloud-based platform that can process 1.5 lakh tickets per minute, nearly five times the current capacity of 32,000 per minute. The new system, built by the Centre for Railway Information Systems, will also handle 40 lakh passenger enquiries a minute, up from 4 lakh currently. The IRCTC beta website went live on July 15, 2026. Early data shows Tatkal bookings completed within the first three minutes improved by over 5%, and within five minutes by about 3%. The old system will not be shut down immediately; the new one will be tested in phases under different traffic loads to avoid disrupting a service that handled 65.08 crore reserved tickets in the year to June 2026, with 89% booked online. ## Coverage - businesstoday.in Tags: cloud platform, CRIS, Indian Railways, IRCTC, PRS, ticket booking Canonical: https://indianopinion.org/indian-railways-to-replace-40-year-old-prs-with-5x-faster-cloud-system/ License: Summary and commentary (c) Indian Opinion, reusable with attribution. Facts belong to the linked sources. Cite: https://indianopinion.org/indian-railways-to-replace-40-year-old-prs-with-5x-faster-cloud-system/#story-in-brief Review state: restored archive article, accurate at time of publication, not offered to search indexes.