Over the next week, close to 3.5 lakh people would leave or arrive every day to and from different destinations within Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere during Sankranti festival. Also, the peak Sabarimalai pilgrimage season adds to the woes of people scrambling for reservations, despite the SCR taking several steps. The scene at Secunderabad, Hyderabad and Kacheguda stations were pretty much the same with people trying to use all their resources to board trains they wanted.
The reservation clerks apart, officials of the commercial department were a harried lot trying to reply to people’s questions about alternative options after being told that even the waitlist was too long for them to at least get on to RAC (Reservation Against Cancellation)
On a normal day, an estimated 2.45 lakh passengers either board or disembark from trains at Secunderabad, Hyderabad and Kacheguda stations. This figure witnesses an exponential boom during festive seasons of Dasara, Deepavali and Sankranti.
General Manager (SCR) P.K. Srivastava said they regularly augmented the composition of several scheduled services by adding extra coaches based on a dynamic analysis of the passenger traffic demand profile. Thus 23,000 additional seats and berths were made available on the public reservation system for January alone, he said.
Also, 133 special trains would be run, including 63 Sabarimalai specials from and to Kollam from different stations on SCR – Kacheguda, Hyderabad, Secunderabad, Sirpur Kagaznagar, Vijayawada, Narsapur, Kakinada and Machilipatnam, apart from 70 Sankranti specials, he explained.
SCR’s focus was on improving comfort, safety and security of passengers by conspicuously ensuring presence of uniformed Railway Protection Force and GRP personnel on station platforms and on board trains to handle the festival rush. “Information technology is being leveraged to its optimum and apart from LED (light emitting diodes) railway information display boards at stations, constant updates of information through official websites/apps and 139 call centre for information, passengers can call 1322 to access the 24X7 security helpline,” he added.
Additional booking and enquiry counters opened for passengers
