Now, interpreted in its plain literal sense, as statutes are interpreted, the app-developer was not in the business of procuring and supplying railway tickets. Section 143 lays down the penalty for “unauthorised carrying on of the business of procuring and supplying railway tickets”. Ironically, a bare perusal of Section 143 of the Railways Act, under which Yuvarajaa has been charged, shows that it has no applicability either to the end-use that his two Android apps - ‘SuperTatkal’ and ‘SuperTatkal Pro’ - facilitated, or to the developer, or the consumers using it to make their life easier while booking tickets. Yuvarajaa must have been onto something because his app garnered 100,000 users in a short time.
The Railway Protection Force of the Southern Railway tracked down Yuvarajaa and arrested him.
Nope, no such luck.Īlso read: India’s local economies lie outside innovation zone. One might think Indian Railways would be on board with this innovation, especially since the enhanced user experience on the margin likely contributes to greater ticket throughput (and hence greater revenue). Yuvarajaa, a resident of Tamil Nadu, who designed an auto-filling mobile application to make the user experience of booking tickets on Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC)’s website smoother.
Consider the case of young IIT-Kharagpur alumnus S. It should dismay us, however, that the same heavy-handed attitude prevails in other industries with far lesser regulatory sensitivities than finance. And while that argument is hardly a winner, it does have plausibility. Now, you might argue that given how innovation in that context intersects with financial stability, consumer savings and fiduciary risks, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
This is, of course, a familiar situation in the financial sector, where our regulators have always “crossed the river by feeling the stones”, as the Chinese idiom goes. Innovators regularly face bureaucratic headwinds ranging from procedural hoops and paperwork (for garden variety tasks like raising capital) to flat out industry-wide shadow bans (note the now-estopped notification of the RBI foreclosing banking access to digital asset intermediaries). Yet, the reality from the entrepreneurial trenches does not square against the rhetoric. From constitutional office-bearers and bureaucrats to think-tankers of assorted political orientation, everyone has a bullish view. Conference keynotes bring up buzzwords like ‘AI’, ‘ML’, ‘blockchain’ with predictable, almost banal, regularity to reinforce the view that India is open to innovation and in lockstep with the bleeding edge of technology. India’s policy-shapers love to talk big on innovation.
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