Indian Railways ticket prices to be hiked? Here’s what national transporter said

Indian Railways passengers, take a note! The Railway Ministry has made clarification for reports on fare hike in passenger trains. Recently, some baseless claims were made by certain sections of the media about the possibility of a hike in passenger train fares. The national transporter has rebuffed these false news reports on the train fare hike possibility. According to an All India Radio (AIR) report, Piyush Goyal-led Indian Railways had 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 national transporter has also requested the media to refrain from publishing or circulating such unfounded reports.

A few days ago, the Railway Minister 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-personalization features linked to user log-in. Also, it boasts other facilities for customization, 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.

An official was quoted in the report saying 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, the new website stores and displays all information about the availability and fares of tickets for all trains on the train search page.