INDIAN RAILWAY INDIRECT FARE INCREASE

The Railway budget of 2008-2009 says that we have not increase the fare from last 4 years, but reality is that they have increased the fare by making all the popular and trains which has 100% occupancy to super-fast category which means each ticket has been increased by 8 to 10% by super-fast charges. The position in southern Railway is that they no more have super-fast number to fill up. All the number from 2601 to 2699 has been allotted and now they have problem to give super-fast number to train which originate from southern or south western railway. (All the super fast trains start with the number 2 and the next number will be zone number for example southern railway has allotted 6, so all the super fast train number from southern railway will start from 26)

As on 1-4-2008 out of 810 pair of total Indian railway trains 400 trains has been converted in to super-fast/rajdhani/ shatabdi/janshatabadi/garibrath trains . that means 50% of Indian trains are come under this category. the remaining trains does not have good occupancy rate and they are mostly weekly or bi-weekly trains which are not so popular.

By 2012 we may not have any mail/express train in Indian railway as they are changing all train to super-fast category.

As there is no guideline for super-fast trains it seems that railway is duping the people by just changing the trains in to super-fast and charging more.

Here is an example;

2656 Chennai to Ahmadabad Nav jeevan express departure at 09.35 and reach Ahmadabad 19.25 next day and the journey hours is 33.50 hours and this is a super-fast train

6125 Chennai to Jodhpur exp departure time is 15.15 and reach Ahmadabad at 01.00 third day and the journey hours is 33.45 hours and this is not a super fast train. this train take 0.05 minute less then super-fast train.

kudos to Lalu and his team for doing this to Indian people who never thinks how he changed the Indian railway financial results.

One more thing they have done in last 4 years in the name of converting metre guage to broad guage they have also converted the old passenger trains to mail/express train which were running in this route when the B.G. line started . thus they converted all passenger train to mail/express train for which fare difference is nearabout 60% and thus getting 60% more revenue to the Indian railway.