We have been traveling through Indian railways from a few decades. Since we belong to Bihar and live in Delhi that’s why we usually travel to and fro between these two stations.
As a middle class family, railway fares were never a matter of concern for us till the present government started increasing it ridiculously. Under worse circumstances, inflation rate of any country remains between 0-3% every year but if you are a regular traveller, you must have observed an exponential increase in ticket prices.
I’ll talk about an instance that’s more than enough to explain how everything is being managed in this department amid this pandemic. During the first covid wave, we were planning to move to our home location i.e. Bihar because since we live there in a village, that’s much safer than Delhi in terms of health concerns. We booked tickets for 6 of us in ’Ndls to Rjpb Special train’ that was earlier known as ’Sampurn Kranti express’. This time fares were extraordinarily high! Before CoViD a ticket would have costed us nearly ₹400-500 but this time it was more than ₹900 and that too for a waiting ticket. Price was not the only burden we had to face. Our tickets got confirmed just at the day of travel with ’RAC’ tags. For those who don’t know what RAC is; it’s railways’ reservation system in which you are given half seat for the price of full. Yes! We were charged more than ₹5400 for 6 seats and given just 3 instead. How can government expect from its citizens to follow social distancing in trains when the railway itself is asking travellers to adjust on half-half seats? And when we boarded the train, most of the seats were vacant and our co-passengers were also anguished after they realised they we all faced same situations! This is nothing more than a tactic to snatch away money from innocent people!