Indian railways earned Rs 9000 crores as people forgot to cancel waitlisted tickets

Ruchita Naik

Pune, 26th February 2020: In last 3 years, Indian railways have earned over 9000 crores rupees over the waitlisted tickets that customers forgot to cancel and ticket cancellation charges, reported PTI, citing an RTI reply.

According to the response of RTI application filed by activist Sujeet Swami, from the year 2017-2020 over 9000 crores earnings were recorded.

The Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), in its response to the RTI application, said that “the national carrier had earned a whopping Rs 4,335 crore in the period between January 1, 2017, to January 31, 2020, from over 9.5 crore passengers who had not cancelled their waitlisted tickets. The national transporter also earned Rs 4,684 crore from the passengers who cancelled their confirmed train tickets. As a standard practice, Indian Railways charges the passengers’ cancellation fee for confirmed tickets, implying that the full amount of the ticket is not refunded. The response to the RTI further revealed that the major source of earnings for both segments was from passengers who had booked sleeper class and Third AC tickets”.

There is a definitive surge in the booking of IRCTC train tickets via online mode. From January 1, 2017, to January 31, 2020, a total of 145 crore passengers had booked their tickets online whereas 74 crore people had taken the older method of booking through Indian Railways reservation counters on the stations.

Activist Swami from Kota filed a plea in Rajasthan High Court, in which he blamed the Indian railways and called its reservation policy discriminatory.

According to Swami, “the ‘gaps’ in the reservation and refund policies for online and counter reservation put passengers under the ‘unnecessary’ burden”.

Swami felt that this was leading to ‘unfair revenue generation’ for Indian Railways.