IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp), the state-owned company that sells tickets and manages catering services for the Indian Railways, filed its draft papers for Initial Public Offering (IPO) with SEBI on Thursday.

The government is looking to offload 20 million shares in IRCTC through the issue that will raise Rs 500 to Rs 600 crore. If the issue sails through, government's stake in the company will be reduced by 12.5 percent.

IRCTC is responsible for the food services and ticket booking facilities provided to passengers of the Indian Railways. It has four segments: 1) Internet ticketing, 2) Catering, 3) packaged drinking water (Rail Neer) and 4)Travel and tourism.

With over 25 million transactions in a month and 7.2 million logins per day, IRCTC is one of the most actively transacted websites in the country. Its catering segments fetches over half of the company's revenue. For the financial year 2018-19, IRCTC made a revenue of Rs 1,044 crore.

In recent years, it launched additional services like online food ordering service over mobile app and travel insurance.

The company was incorporated in 1999 and was given Miniratna (Category-I Public Sector Enterprise) status on 1 May 2008.

The IPO is part of government's disinvestment plan to raise Rs 1.05 trillion in the FY 2019-20. Listing of 5 railway entities was approved by the central government in 2017. These include, IRCON International, RITES, Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd, IRFC and IRCTC.