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Facing flak from the public on its plans to introduce ‘surge pricing’ for train tickets, Indian Railways has clarified that the “flexi-fare system” has been introduced on an experimental basis on 142 high-end trains — Rajdhani, Shatabdi and Duronto.
This constitutes just 1.1 per cent of the total 12,500 trains run daily and 4.4 per cent of the total number of mail/express trains run each day, a statement from the Railways said.
It added that the common man would not be affected by this system as it would apply only to 1.5 lakh out of 2.3 crore daily passengers carried by the Railways — that is 0.65 per cent of the total passengers carried and 10 per cent of the reserved passengers. The statement said that dynamic pricing was a norm across railways in countries such as Russia, Europe, the US and Japan,adding that it recovered only 37 paise per km as against 73 paise spent on each passenger.
However, recovery in freight was 155 paise as against the cost of 99 paise, the statement said. The sleeper class fares and second class tickets were cheaper than bus fares for routes such as Lucknow-Kanpur, Lucknow-Allahabad, Lucknow-Gorakhpur, Lucknow Jhansi, New Delhi-Agra and New Delhi-Chandigarh (less than 300 km), it added.
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