The initial title of this post was Garib Rath experience and just thought of writing about my first experience in garib rath train from bangalore (yeshwantpur station) to hyderabad (secunderabad station). I found many good points in it and there were some things that I didn’t like. But yesterday night when I was coming back from hyderabad to bangalore by kachiguda-bangalore express, I was surprised to see a major change in the 3rd A.C. compartments which made me to change the title of this post and the content as well.
After getting into the train, I had put my luggage and was just waiting for the train to start. I didn’t give much attention to any new changes in the bogie. Just as the train started, instead of the normal 6 people who sit in the six side coupe, an additional person has come…a total of 7 were supposed to sit. I was surprised as to how come 7 would be sitting there because if someone had an RAC ticket, that would be for the side berth. Then when I turned towards the side berths, I could not believe my eyes……instead of the normal side upper and side lower, they had introduced an additional side middle 😯 . A side middle 😀 in a normal express train!!!!! That’s something we would definitely not want to have. It makes sense to have that in Garib Rath as its entire concept is different. But trying to increase the seating capacity in a normal express train by introducting additional berths is definitely not acceptable.
Actually, when I saw this kind of seating arrangement in Garib Rath, I really appreciated the innovative thinking of railways. They were trying to provide a full A.C. train and to recover the costs, had to increase the seating capactiy. Makes perfect sense in this scenario. But there should be a limit to the greed. Now trying to follow the same thing in normal trains is definitely not good. Even the T.C. in the train was saying that these people are making the A.C. compartments like general compartments now.
Now this reminds me of an artice that I had read long back about the reasons how Laloo could take indian railways to make profits (or rather just created an illusion of making profits 😀 )…..just to summarize two main points…. one was the increase of tatkal quota and issuing tatkal quota tickets from 5 days before the journey (now this is like selling tickets in black publicly)…..second one was related to the freight….the goods wagons were being overloaded much above the capacity that they could actually hold….this directly increases the profits of railways but what about the wear & tear of wagons and the tracks, the safety of the trains……all this just to show some profits in the short-term??? I could not find the original article where I had read about this but a quick google search led me to this article which also talks about the same facts.
And now even the passenger trains are not being left out……berths being increased in the existing compartments!!!! I really can’t understand where are these people heading to…. now this is what I say commercialisation….
