If Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has his way, passengers won’t be the only individuals who would suffer thanks to train delays. As reported by the PTI, Goyal has warned zonal General Managers that a train delay would result in their appraisals too getting differed proportionally. Following this, he gave them a month’s time to implement corrective measures.
Hence the report claims that if the situation doesn’t improve by 30 June, the erring General Managers would not be considered for promotions. Goyal also brought in a competitive spirit between the zones by supposedly stating that the performance ratings would depend on how they fare as compared to the peers. Hence if they rank lower on the delay list, the worse they fare.
As per the report, Goyal in a meeting last months had also warned the officers that the excuse of maintenance work won’t do as an explanation for train delays.
To put out the figures, 30 per cent of Indian Trains didn’t run on time from 2017-18. The Northern Railway fares the worse with a dismal 49,59 per cent punctuality rate till 29 May, seeing a dip of 32.74 per cent in performance. The Eastern and Northeast Frontier zones had seen a dip of 26 and 27 per cent respectively.
As reported by Swarajya, the Indian Railways considers trains to be on time if they are delayed by less than 15 minutes. But soon the railway might revamp it by proposing five grades of punctuality where trains would be classified as, “excellent”, “very good”, “good”, “fair” and “bad” based on the criteria laid out.
Incidentally, such a warning closely follows guidelines proposed by aviation minister Jayant Sinha, where a flyer would be eligible for a full refund if an airline cancels a flight or delays it by more than 4 hours.
The proposed compensation laid out is Rs 5000 if a passenger misses a flight due to a three-hour delay. For delays ranging from four to twelve hours the compensation would be Rs 10,000 and for delays more than that a passenger would be eligible for a Rs 20,000 compensation.
