In a vast country like ours, resource management would be so much easier if all our infrastructural facilities operate in line with one another.
One such plan, if it takes off, can make lives of railway passengers a lot easier. Passengers with unconfirmed AC-I or AC-II tickets for Rajdhani Express may soon be able to fly to their destinations.
There’s a huge demand-supply gap in Indian Railways which results in a large number of people not getting their AC-II Rajdhani tickets confirmed. At the same time, Air India faces a problem of low occupancy rate of passengers.
Integrating these two issues, Ashwani Lohani, a 1980-batch Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers officer, conceived an idea that contact details of all the passengers with an unconfirmed Rajdhani ticket will be shared with the AI so that they could be offered to fly to their destination after paying the additional amount.
Ashwani Lohani had proposed this idea last year when he was Air India chairman, but Indian Railways wasn’t ready for it. Lohani, who’s now the chairman of the railway board, has said that Railways will accept the plan if Air India puts it up again!
If the plan materialises, it can do away with a lot of our hassles!