Indian Railways cracks down on overcharging of food on trains! Several complaints have been received by the national transporter regarding the overcharging of food items that are being sold in the trains including Superfast trains. According to the information given by the Railway Minister Piyush Goyal in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha recently, various measures have been taken by Indian Railways against the complaints that were received by them during the period from 1 April 2019 to 31 December 2019. According to the Railway Minister, during this period, a total of 1,962 number of complaints were received by the national transporter.
Indian Railways imposed as many as 989 complaints, with a total amount of Rs 75,39,800 in fines. A number of 526 complaints resulted in a warning, 273 complaints resulted in suitably advising, 55 complaints were not substantiated, while 119 were due to any other reason, the minister stated.
According to the Railway Minister, the national transporter has taken the following measures in order to curb overcharging from passengers:
• Indian Railways has introduced hand held POS machines along with QR code for the generation of bills so that they can be handed over to customers or passengers.
• Also, prominent display of menu along with the food prices has been made mandatory with waiters through various means viz. websites, newspaper, social media, trains at a glance, etc.
• On board IRCTC supervisors have been deployed for continuous monitoring.
• MRP on food boxes has been made mandatory. With no mention of MRP, the license gets cancelled.
• Indian Railways has also initiated an awareness campaign “No Bill- Food is for FREE”. In this, if the passengers are not provided with the bill, he or she can have it for free.
• For feedback as well as complaints of passengers, a robust system is there for redressal through Twitter handle, CPGRAMS, Rail Madad, SMS, and E-Mail based complaints.