Railways to charge ‘user fee’ at nearly 1,000 stations, tickets may cost more

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Indian Railways is planning to introduce ‘affordable’ user fees at 700-1,050 railway stations across the country with high footfalls in order to generate more revenue while providing better world-class facilities to passengers. In a press briefing on Thursday, Railway Board Chairman V K Yadav stated that the national transporter will soon start levying a “user fee” as part of train fares for stations that have been redeveloped and major stations with high footfall to generate more revenue to provide better facilities for passengers.

The charges would be nominal, and applicable in 10-15 per cent of the 7,000 railway stations across the country, Yadav added. Note that that initial plan was to levy user charges from passengers using only 50 modernized stations. However, now the plan is to introduce nominal fee at over 1,000 stations. 

“We will keep a very small amount for the user charge. We will issue a notification for the user charge for all stations, including those being redeveloped and those that are not. When the redevelopment of the stations is completed, the money will go to the concessionaires, till then that money will go to the railways for improving facilities across stations. It will be an affordable amount, but it is important to levy if we want to provide world-class facilities similar to airports. We want to upgrade all our major railway stations,” Yadav said.

Assuring people that not all stations will have the fee, Yadav said, “We will not levy it across all our 7,000 stations, but all major stations where passenger footfall is increasing over the next five years.” It will be done in 10-15 per cent of all Railways’ network stations where footfall is expected to increase,” he added. The announcement statement comes at a time when we are already concerned over a potential rise in prices of tickets with private entities being allowed to run trains in the country. 

NITI Aayog chief executive officer Amitabh Kant was also present in the briefing and he stated that the objective is to offer 50 stations for redevelopment by the end of next year. A pre-fixed and affordable user charge will be notified by the transporter. “We are looking at a close to ₹1 trillion investment. RFQ (request for qualification) for 10 stations have been floated. Eight stations (including Gwalior and Surat) received overwhelming participation (from private investors),” Kant said.

User charges are basically a token amount, which will be used to improve facilities at station for the convenience of all passengers. As per officials, the fee will only be collected by the facility management when the development of the station is complete. Prior to that, if there is a need to levy any user charge, it will only go to Railways and will be ploughed back for improvement of facilities for the passengers.