There is no plan to reconsider the levy of service charges for online booking through the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) portal according to Railway Minister Piyush Goyal.
[IRCTC levies Rs 15 + GST for every non- AC ticket and Rs 30 +GST for AC ticket. It had temporarily scrapped these charges in November 2016 to promote digital payments.]
Replying to a parliament question, Goyal observed IRCTC incurs substantial expenditure for providing alternate accommodation to passengers, artificial intelligence -based PNR confirmation predictor and many such services.
The convenience fee is essential to defray the cost incurred for maintenance, upgradation and expansion of ticketing infrastructure, Goyal added.
According to Goyal, online ticketing through IRCTC was only moving upward and constituted about 72 per cent of total reserved tickets despite the levy of convenience fee.
No privatisation of rail operations
There is no proposal to privatise Indian Railways’ operations, according to Goyal.
However, there is a plan to outsource the commercial and on-board services of a few trains besides permitting private train operators with modern rakes on select routes for improved service delivery to passengers, he said in Parliament.
Moreover, IR would outsource certain services like station cleaning, pay and use toilets, retiring rooms, parking and platform maintenance on a need based manner, he added.
CCTV in coaches
IR will fit closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in its trains / coaches . As on date, CCTV cameras have been provided in over 2,000 coaches of about 114 Mainline trains, 88 Electric Multiple Unit (EMU) rakes and 4 Mainline Electric Multiple Unit (MEMU) rakes.
No timeframe for rail connectivity with Eastern neighbours
Goyal informed the Parliament that there was no precise time frame for the execution of rail connectivity projects with neighbouring countries.
These depend on various factors such as land acquisition and forest clearance and the like in India, he said.
Neighbours also have to do large number of works within their country, he added.
Presently, India is connected to Nepal at Jogbani–Biratnagar and Jaynagar-Bardibas.
With Bangladesh, there are two rail connectivity projects between Agartala -Akhuara , Haldibari – Chilhati besides the four existing links, Gede -Darshana, Petrapole -Benapole, Singhabad-Rohanpur and Radhikapur – Birol.
No rail connectivity project is under construction on India’s borders between Bhutan and Myanmar.