Railways fail to cash in on RTC strike

Mahbubnagar: Usually, it is a general trend that whenever the RTC employees go on a strike, this will be a big opportunity for the Railways department to cash in on the opportunity and make money during the crises period.

However, going by the statistics provided by the Railways officials regarding the revenue collections on the first day of strike, the Mahbubnagar railway station could achieve only a jump of just 20 per cent excess to its usual daily collection.

According to a senior railway official, during the regular days, the Mahbubnagar station earns nearly Rs 1.5 lakh from the sales of tickets to the passengers, however, during the RTC strike time, this revenue collection could have doubled, but unfortunately the department could gain an additional amount of only Rs 30,000 extra and recorded a collection of just Rs. 1.80 lakh on the first day of the RTC strike in the district.

As per the analysts, the main reason why the people are not opting for railways in the period of RTC strike crises is because they prefer the private vehicles and private buses as against the trains because of the late running of the trains between the Mahbubnagar and Hyderabad routes.

"Everyday thousands of passengers travel to and from Mahbubnagar to Hyderabad for jobs and other works. With RTC strike the gain for the railways should have been double but because of some issues such as bad time management and frequent halting of trains in between due to crossings is causing lot of inconvenience to the passengers.

Moreover, there are very few fast running and express trains that have halts at major stations. Because of these, people are preferring private buses and other vehicles to trains as they are more accessible and move faster as per their convenience," said venkateshwarlu, a regular rail passenger.

On the other hand, the railway department officials are of the opinion that as Railways provide cheaper and safer transportation compared to other modes of transport, definitely this will pick up in the coming days and expressed hope that Railway will definitely earn good revenues in the coming days.