The Indian Railways has decided not to resume regular passenger services, at least till June 30. However, the ongoing special trains and Shramik specials will continue to run.
The national transporter said in a notification on Wednesday that all the regular passenger operations, including mail, express, passenger and suburban services will remain cancelled until further guidelines from the authorities. The notification added that all the tickets booked on these trains till June 30 will remain cancelled and passengers will be provided full refund for them. This comes almost 53 days after the government stopped passenger services on March 22.
These tickets were booked as advanced reservations in the months of January, February and March. Normally, the national transporter allows booking for about four months in advance.
The gradual resumption of passenger services happened through 15 pairs of special trains which started operating on May 12. From May 13 onwards, IRCTC has started taking the destination address of all passengers booking tickets on special trains, to ensure contact tracing, if required later. Before special trains, on May 1, Shramik special trains started running for transportation of migrants, tourists and students stuck in various cities. The notification made it clear that these trains will continue operations.
The special trains are running between New Delhi railway station to Howrah, Rajendra Nagar, Dibrugarh, Jammu Tawi, Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai Central, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad, Agartala, Bhubaneswar, Madgaon, and Secunderabad. After the restart of bookings for fully-air conditioned special trains on May 11, over 200,000 passengers have booked tickets to travel on these trains. The decision by the Railways to shut passenger services had led to stoppage of around 12,500 daily trains on a daily basis – including 9,000 passenger trains and 3,500 mail express trains.
In Shramik Special Trains, a maximum of nearly 1200 passengers travel while observing social distancing protocols. A similar number of passengers are transported in special trains too. Proper screening of passengers is ensured before boarding the train. Though passenger operations were stopped, freight operations were being continued to ensure the availability of essential goods. According to Indian Railways, so far, over 125,000 tickets were booked for over 234,000 passengers. While 20,149 people travelled on these trains on Wednesday, around 25,737 people are expected to travel on Thursday. On the other hand, till Wednesday, a total of 751 Shramik Special trains were run, transporting over 800,000 people.
Interestingly, in a separate notification, the Railways indicated that waitlisted tickets will now be available for bookings opening on May 15 for journeys beginning from May 22. "We have now relaxed the refund rules for these trains. We will start issuing very few waitlisted tickets from May 22 because some passengers are cancelling their tickets at the last moment," said a railways official.