CAG finds fault with Rajdhani, Shatabdi

These prestigious trains were late on 54 per cent of occasions

“If measured from a passenger’s perspective—arrival at destination at the time given in the time table— trains were late on 54 per cent of occasions, while prestigious trains like Rajdhani and Shatabdi were late on 53 per cent of occasions,” the CAG report said.
The report maintained that, now, the Indian Railways address punctuality purely from an operational point of view, where trains handed over late by one zone to another were recorded as being punctual so long as they do not get delayed further.

In addition, the zones reported wrong data in order to show that trains were punctual on 95 per cent of the occasions, the CAG report said.

An independent assessment  of 568 trains disclosed that as many as 79,122 runs out of 1,45,886 runs, which constituted 54.24 per cent of the total runs, the trains had reached the destinations beyond their scheduled time of arrival.

Out of these, on 30,487 occasions, the delays were for more than one hour.
Moreover, the delays were  due to factors like engineering delay, signal failure, loco failure and miscellaneous reasons than due to external factors or untoward incidents.

The delayed runs of super fast trains accounted for 23,247 out of 79,122 runs, which included prestigious trains like Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Jan Shatabdi and Sampark Kranti.
During 2007-08, the 37 Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains that were reviewed reached the destinations late on 53 per cent (4,956 out of 9,378 runs) of the occasions.

Even while considering the engine hour cost of a diesel loco, the delayed runs reviewed involved an extra expenditure of Rs 47.41 crore on fuel consumption alone.