Railways to do away with waiting lists

Plans on drawing board to reduce congestion on 20,000-km of track

The Railway Ministry is working on some fool-proof plan to do away with waiting list of train tickets. Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi disclosed it on Thursday while informally talking to a group of journalists.

“The ministry is working on that. This could be done. I have asked officials to run special trains for this, so that every one should get confirmed tickets. Railways has the responsibility to provide it to every passenger, ” the minister said.

Elaborating on the plans, the minister said that when a train cannot accommodate all passengers, another train, a special train, should follow it to carry the remaining passengers.  The procedures and mechanism of running special trains are already with the railway, he said.

He also said that he had taken some more measures to remove certain anomalies in the ticketing system that increases the problems of common passengers. “I have asked the officials to verify whether the requests for berths under VIP quota have genuinely been made by an MP or others, so that it should not be misused,” he said.

Trivedi said, for the long term, we have decided to focus on 20,000 km of tracks which is most congested and carry majority of passengers. Several measures including technological ones are being taken to ease pressure and increase carrying capacity on these routes.

However, if we want a long term solution we require a thorough change in the way the railway is managed, he said.

Railway requirement

He said that the ministry needed Rs 14 lakh crore for its plans to be implemented in the coming 10 years. This is essential to implement modernisation plans envisaged in the Vision- 2020 of Mamata Banerjee. The resources can be mobilised from both the government and the private investors.
Trivedi said he was in constant touch with the Planning Commission and would meet the prime minister for mobilising the required financial resources.

He advocated massive modernisation in all the sectors including signalling system, rolling stock and tracks.  He said safety was the highest priority and without spending on automation we could not do any thing.

He pleaded for doing away with human intervention, “Japan did not have any rail accidents for 47 years now because of their reliance on modern technology,” Trivedi