Railways issues clarification about scrapping waiting list by 2024

19-12-2020

Indian Railways on Friday unveiled its draft National Rail Plan. As per the plan, Railways is looking to run demand-based passenger trains while raising its share in freight movement from 27% now to 45% by 2030. The plan assures that all the tickets of all passengers will be confirmed and there will be no waiting list. However, the national transporter today issued a clarification about scrapping the waiting list. The statement said, "Various newspapers and online publications have given wide coverage to draft National Rail Plan. Some of the news reports appear to suggest that Railways has said that there would be No waiting list with effect from 2024 or only confirmed tickets would be available by 2024." "Railways would like to explain and clarify that efforts are being made to increase the capacity to make trains available on demand. This would reduce the possibility of passengers getting waitlisted. Wait list is a provision that remains whenever the demand for travelers in a given train is more than number of berths or seats available," it added. The statement further said that the provision is not being done away with. "Waitlist" is a provision that acts as a buffer to mitigate the fluctuations in demand and availability. It is worth adding that the draft spells out the roadmap towards upgrading railway infrastructure to achieve this target. The draft has made a demand assessment of over 100 locations, and traffic growth forecast, on a year-on-year basis, up till 2030. It also plans to achieve freight movement of 2024 million tonnes by 2024 as part of its Vision 2024 as against the current 1210 million tonnes in 2019, which is 27% of the total national freight of 4700 million tonnes last year. Railways has estimated the total national freight movement till 2026 at 6400 million tonnes. �This will require capital expenditure of Rs 2.9 lakh crore,� said Railway Board chairman Yadav said at the virtual media briefing on Friday. �We will seek a stakeholder view on the draft National Rail Plan and hope to finalise it in a months� time,� Yadav said, adding the plan is to also rationalise freight tariff while bringing down the operating cost.