Elusive railway tickets
AS happened many times before, tens of thousands of Eid holidaymakers are facing difficulties in booking their passage home. It's already too late to increase the intake capacity for the swelling number of passengers rushing to travel by train.
Apart from the limited capacity, the blocking of tickets for VIPs, on-line complications and suspected black marketing deprive many ticket seekers of a chance to get it, particularly in good time.
Railways being a bulk carrier of passenger and a safe mode of transportation it is preferred to other modes of transportation. The resulting rush for railway journey cannot be adequately catered for by makeshift adhoc arrangements. In immediate terms, therefore, the answer lies in optimisation of available capacity through increased frequency of trips. In spite of inducting three special intercity trains little is expected to change as they will only replace the six severely damaged trains during the countrywide violence late last year.
On the longer term, to overcome the shortage in capacity, a master plan for the development of BR is needed, where issues relating to infrastructural expansion including increase in rolling stock and better maintenance should be specifically addressed. In addition to donor driven programmes for an overall development and modernisation of the railway as a part of the multimodal transport system it's time the private sector gets extensively involved in the endeavour.
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