No decline in passenger traffic in railways

New Delhi: Dismissing reports of a sharp decline in railway passenger traffic, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the national transporter will touch the pre-Covid passenger traffic of 650 to 700 crore in a year.

He was reacting to the debate on social media that the number of train passengers has become half what it used to be in 2010.

After the Covid lockdown, the railways started train services in December 2021, and by July 2022, operations were normalised. In the 2022–23 financial year, 640 crore people used the train network, the minister told media persons here on Sunday.

Numbers to go up

As per our conservative estimate, 650 crore people will travel by train in the current fiscal. The number might go up to 750 crore. So we were back to the pre-Covid era when the number of train travellers used to be around 700 crore, he added.

The railways is expecting passenger’ numbers to go up to 1,000 crore in the next 4–5 years. To meet the demand, it plans to operate around 3,000 extra trains in four to five years and remove the ‘waitlist problem’.

At present, the railways operates a total of 10,748 trains, including 5,774 trains in suburban areas.

The minister denied criticism that the number of non-AC coaches or sleeper class coaches has been reduced. The national transporter has around 60,000 train coaches, out of which 40,000 are non-AC.