*Goosebumps*
You will feel this too when you get to know what we are talking about.
As per a recent research, over 10 lakh people, yes, you heard that right…over 10 lakh people are unable to travel to their preferred location owing to the unavailability of train tickets. And we all know this very well that the demand-supply mismatch is a well-known disappointment with the Indian Railways, i.e. the number of people wanting to travel in a particular train is inversely proportion to the number of seats available.
Since Jan 2016, one of the premier train portals for train travellers (Indian Railways) has been tracking patterns of train ticket bookings across India to figure out the reason for the mentioned mismatch.
Based on the recent findings, nearly 10-12 lakh potential travellers have been unable to travel everyday; thanks to their non-confirmed tickets. And these are the passengers whose waitlisted tickets didn’t get confirmed. Usually 13% of the long distance train travellers fail to travel everyday. In peak season, the percentages goes up to 19%. That’s huge!
The readings were gathered by data scientists who followed a mathematical procedure to analyse the travel pattern of over 30 lakh passengers from over 3,100 railway stations (who were trying book seats in nearly 2,800 trains).
Manish Rathi, Co-founder and CEO of the premium travel portal stated, “While we were always aware of the demand-supply mismatch in train travel, the scale of surplus demand, as brought out by this study, has been an eye opener for us”.
He further added, “The ability for citizens to travel in an unconstrained manner is an essential spoke in the wheel of any nation’s economy. Despite increase in several transport options, trains continue to be the most preferred mode for long distance travel. It is tempting to think that adding of more trains would be the ideal solution. However, this would require hundreds of more trains running every day”.
“Train travellers now need to consider a multi-modal travel approach as and where feasible. One of our endeavours is to enable travellers do the same by connecting them to long distance buses, taxis, etc.”, suggests Rathi.
