Indian Railway News: Trains stopped due to Corona epidemic are being run slowly but not all trains have returned to track yet. However, now all the trains are planned to run soon from 1 April 2021. The railways had stopped operating all trains in the national lockdown in March 2020 due to Corona epidemic last year. However, after some time special trains started operating and currently, around 65 percent of the trains across the country are running on the track. Earlier this year, in January 2021, 250 trains were started.
Commerce, Industry and Railways Minister Piyush Goyal said sometime back in the month of February that talks will be held with other stakeholders for starting normal train services. The Union Minister said that the Corona Vaccination Program is going on, in such a situation that there are necessary precessions and preventions regarding the Corona epidemic, there is a need to continue.
Soon decision on General, Shatabdi and Rajdhani trains
It is believed that all passenger trains will start from April 1 in view of festive demand. However, a railway spokesperson told the Financial Express that no such date is yet to be determined. When the train will run, a decision will be taken after talking to all the stakeholders. Under this, a decision will be taken to run all General, Shatabdi and Rajdhani trains.
Currently, 704 local trains are running on the Western Railway route of Mumbai, through which about 3.95 lakh passengers are travelling. 706 local trains are also running on the Central Railway route, due to which about 4.57 lakh passengers are travelling.
More than 83% of railway tickets booked through IRCTC
The number of passengers in trains is increasing. For this, the Indian Railway Tourism and Catering Corporation (IRCTC) has upgraded the user interface. Apart from this, IRCTC has added the feature of AutoPay to its payment gateway i-Pay, through which users are taking less time to book tickets. Apart from this, the refund time has also been reduced in case of Tatkal tickets being auto-cancelled. IRCTC is one of the largest e-commerce websites in Asia-Pacific through which more than 83 percent of railway tickets are booked.