Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has signed a deal with payments and mobile commerce company Paytm to integrate its payment gateway. Paytm already has two deals with IRCTC to book tickets and pay for meals through its wallet. With this integration, Paytm will be able to process payments through wallet, debit and credit cards, and netbanking. Paytm mentioned that it is the first payment aggregator to tie up with IRCTC and the government company had to have individual tie ups with banks. However, Paytm declined to give specifics of the deal with the catering company i.e. how much it would charge for processing a transaction. IRCTC, on the other hand, handles massive number of transactions. In April 2015, IRCTC users booked 13.45 lakh e-tickets on a single day, its highest so far, and up from 5.80 lakh e-tickets in March 2014, which was the previous record, and 5.72 lakh in September 2013. In May, IRCTC claimed to process over 180 million transactions every year. It also generated Rs 20,620 crore (~ $3.08 billion) in online ticketing with a profit after tax of Rs 130 crore ($19.5 million) from March 2014- March 2015. This was up 34% from a year ago, when its revenue was Rs 15,410 crore ($2.3 billion), and a profit of Rs 72 crore ($10.8 million). IRCTC also posted income of Rs 1,141 crore ($171 million), including the sales of ticket service charge, Rail Neer bottled water, in house catering services and license fees from outsourced catering vendors. Its combined income from…
