Indian Railways junks talks on ticket prices hike

Since some time, there were rumours going around of  a possibility of a hike in passenger train fares.

Rubbishing all these talks, the national transporter has rebuffed these false news reports. According to an AIR report, the Indian Railways has said that there is no factual basis on these reports and at present, any proposal to increase the fare of passenger trains is not under consideration. Moreover, the railways have also requested the media to refrain from publishing or circulating such unfounded reports.

A few days ago, the Railway Minister Piyush Goyal inaugurated the revamped e-ticketing IRCTC website. Within a week of the upgraded e-ticketing website’s launch, it has witnessed a 12 per cent increase in the number of page views as well as a 37 per cent improvement in its response time, according to a PTI report.

The newly upgraded website and mobile app of IRCTC have user-personalisation features linked to user log-in. Also, it boasts of other facilities for customisation, offers one-stop train selection for ticket booking along with integrated booking for accommodation as well as meals with tickets. The revamped IRCTC web portal was introduced on 31 December 2020.

It is said that the upgraded e-ticketing website has reduced the number of clicks for the IRCTC user while checking the availability of tickets by providing all required details on a single page. For checking the availability of tickets, the revamped website has resulted in the elimination of the need for nearly twenty clicks. Earlier, the availability of train seats and fares could be only seen by the user after clicking on that train individually which was around twenty more clicks per ticket booking.

Also, each click by the user used to fetch data from the system, putting additional load on the IRCTC website. The official added that the new website stores and displays all information about the availability and fares of tickets for all trains on the train search page.