Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) booked more than five lakh rail e-tickets yesterday, surpassing the earlier one-day sales record set in July last year.

The Corporation booked 5.02 lakh e-tickets, crossing the earlier figure of 4.96 lakh e-tickets booked on July 7 last year, an IRCTC official said.

The record, he said, comes at a time when the IRCTC is facing criticism of its website failing to cope up with the peak hour rush for Tatkal bookings and during festive season.

IRCTC had recently invested Rs 3.5 crore in enhancing the efficiency of the website and another Rs three crore in augmenting the software licenses and storage area network.

The system is now being upgraded with more powerful Hexa Core servers (with 64GB RAM) from the earlier Dual Core servers (with 8GB RAM), which is costing nearly Rs four crore, the official said.

"With the above investment/upgradation, we are hopeful to achieve around 40-45 per cent increase in the booking during the Tatkal hours," he said.

At present, the e-ticketing site books around 48 per cent of the total reserved tickets on the Indian Railways network.

Railway Minister Pawan Bansal, in his budget speech, had announced revamping the IRCTC site by increasing the booking rate to 7,200 tickets per minute from its present around 2,000 tickets.

He had declared that the site, expected to be ready by the year-end, would be able to handle 1.2 lakh users at any point of time as compared to its existing capacity of 40,000 users.

IRCTC has already started working on this augmentation, in which they are investing crores of rupees to install future generation hardware and software.