IRCTC 

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited is a Navratna listed company under the Ministry of Railways and the hospitality-and-travel arm of Indian Railways, incorporated on 27 September 1999 to professionalise catering and hospitality at stations and on trains and to promote domestic and international tourism. It is not a private travel agency, not a hotel chain with a borrowed railway logo, and not a WhatsApp ticket broker. A passenger who books a berth, orders e-catering, or buys Rail Neer is still dealing with the same public-sector company that runs four core activities: Catering and Hospitality, Internet Ticketing, Travel and Tourism, and packaged drinking water. Catering covers station and onboard meals plus e-catering, which lets a passenger order food for delivery on a moving train through the website or the Food on Track application. Internet ticketing is the national online rail-reservation desk and also links to bus and air booking so the same login can cover more than one mode. Travel and tourism packages include destination itineraries, the Buddhist Special Tourist Train, the Maharajas’ Express, the Golden Chariot, and related travel management. Rail Neer is the packaged-water business, with 19 plants listed across Delhi, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. The company works through five zonal offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Secunderabad, plus ten regional offices, one Internet Ticketing Office in New Delhi, and one Tourism Office in New Delhi. Investor pages, annual reports, public notices, careers, and customer support sit on irctc.com. Fraud is a live operational risk. Fake Facebook and WhatsApp “booking groups,” look-alike apps, and agents who ask for passwords, OTPs, or extra cash for confirmed tickets are not IRCTC. The corporation itself warns users about unauthorised railway-booking and food-service claims. Official social destinations—Facebook at IRCTCofficial, Instagram at irctc.official, X at IRCTCofficial, YouTube at IRCTCOFFICIAL, and LinkedIn at irctcofficial—are brand and public-information channels. They do not confirm waitlisted tickets in private chat and do not collect payment on a personal UPI ID. Book only on irctc.com or the official apps, and treat every “urgent confirmation” message as fraud until the official site shows the same PNR.