Title - 'Quality of services need to be improved'

VADODARA: Indian Railways (IR) runs more than 12,000 passenger trains carrying around 2.5 crore passengers daily. However, the passenger business of IR is incurring huge losses.

Keeping this in mind, the National Academy of Indian Railways (NAIR), the apex railway institute of training and management, organized a two day seminar here on 'Making IR's Passenger Business Profitable'. The seminar that was held on Tuesday and Wednesday was inaugurated by D P Pande, member traffic of the Railway Board and ex-officio secretary to the Government of India. During seminar, participants which included S B Ghosh Dastidar, ex-member traffic of Railway Board, V N Mathur, ex-member traffic of Railway Board, R K Tandon, managing director of IRCTC, Pramod Uniyal, ex-additional member (C &IS) Railway Board, professor Narayan Rangraj from IIT Mumbai and other railways officers made presentations.

The participants suggested ideas such as improving the quality of services, using innovative ways for providing value added services in trains and stations, increasing revenue by other sources like commercial advertising, parking, indexing the passenger tariff with cost of inputs, with dynamic pricing by revenue management concept, standardising the passenger services increasing productivity of assets among others to make the business profitable.