The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, which does online ticketing for Indian Railways, saw its ticketing revenue for FY2020-21 drop by around 56%, the government revealed in a Parliamentary response. In the first eleven months of the financial year ending March 2021, the ticketing revenues amounted to Rs 14,915 crore, a 56% decrease year over year. In FY2019-20, earnings increased 6% over the previous financial year. This gels with an overall reduction in passenger revenue, which in December 2020 was down a staggering 87%. Online ticketing revenues are likely to have suffered less because in-person ticket booking remains viable due to its lower price and wider reach. Ticketing is IRCTC's main source of revenue. The fees the PSU collects on online bookings are not refundable. 3,982,541 tickets were booked for cancelled trains on IRCTC during the initial months of the pandemic, according to an RTI filed by MediaNama — IRCTC refunded the fares on those bookings, but did not refund the commission it charges on online bookings. It is not clear how much money it made from cancelled train bookings — IRCTC declined to reveal that information to MediaNama, and demanded a payment of Rs 35,400 for "data extraction charges". On the B2B side, though, the collection has increased. "Collection of freight charges through e-payment has gone up from 76.16% last year (2019-20) to 83.77% in the current financial year (2020-21)," the government said in its response. The government was responding to queries from DMK MP S. Gnanathiraviam. Full…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...