Indian Railways to reduce fares for Shatabdi trains on short distance routes

Source: in.yahoo.com

New Delhi: In a good news for passengers, the Indian Railways is set to reduce the fares for short distance travels in Shatabdi trains across the country following a successful experiment in two such trains.

According to the railways, passenger movement between non-terminating and non-originating railway stations on the route of Shatabdi trains were low and the passengers were opting for air-conditioned bus services in these sections because of its low fare.

“Between Ajmer and Jaipur, and two stations between Chennai and Bengaluru, we saw that AC buses were charging around Rs 430 and Shatabdi fare was around Rs 470. As a consequence, the patronage on these short-lead travels was around 30 per cent.

So we decided to reduce the rates to Rs 350 and now the patronage has reached almost 100 per cent,” said Mohammed Jamshed, member (traffic), Railway Board, the Indian Express reported.

Jamshed added that railways now plans to introduce the system across all Shatabdi trains.

Shatabdi is a superfast express train category which connects major Indian cities.

Railways also saw a 1 per cent increase in passenger in 2016-17 to 822.1 crore passengers from 815.1 crore transported during 2015-16 because of the slew of measures and introduction of new categories of trains such as Humsafar and adding 43,420 berths in 2016-17. Railways ran 31,438 trips of special trains as well.