How to make a booking from outside India on irctc.co.in Indian-Railway-Catering-and-Tourism-Corporation Review

Right now October 2019 is it not possible to make a booking on irctc.co.in directly.

You can create an account, get the OTP SMS, verify your email and phone number. But there is a bug that prevents you from paying the "International Users to pay registration /mobile updation fees for the mobile numbers with ISD code other than 91 and i.e. Rs.100 +GST"

If you try to make a booking, you can search for the trains and see them. But when you click to "book", nothing happens. No error, nothing - but you cannot book.

There is a solution!

1) You need to create the account on irctc.co.in (username and password)
2) Then use cleartrip.com to find and make your booking.
3) During this process you get passed back to the irctc.co.in site, and using a "back door" you can then make the payment for "international users".
3) Pay Cleartrip and everything looks good.
4) Maybe you can stop at this point.
5) About 30mins later Cleartrip cancelled my booking and refunded the money - no explanation was given.
6) Now your irctc.co.in account will work, and you can search, book and pay on that site!

Welcome to India!