Better food and services, not more trains: What the aam aadmi wants from Rail Budget 2015

What do people want from a Railway budget? CNN-IBN together with Today’s Chanakya, conducted a survey to find out what the aam aadmi wish list for the rail budget was. A number of questions pertaining to food, ease of booking tickets and what people wanted most were asked.

Here are some of the findings:

Improve services before introducing new trains

Something perhaps that rail minister after rail minister should take more note of, as they introduce train after train into the railways system. The people would just like the existing system to work better, thank you very much!

The cleanliness of long distance trains is far from satisfactory

No arguments on this one. Even government ministers are aware of the poor standard of cleanliness on long distance trains in particular. Sushil Kumar Shinde’s daughter for instance, was a victim of bed bugs on a train. And while it’s true that there should certainly be a much bigger effort to ensure that trains are clean, it would be churlish to completely ignore the part that commuters themselves play in keeping a train dirty or clean. Seriously, learn to use a toilet, people!

Better food, please!

They may ply you with food, but a lot of users feel that the quality of what you get to eat needs to be improved.

Tatkal remains a nightmare

Think buying a Xiaomi phone is difficult? Try getting a tatkal ticket! Despite measures taken to ease tatkal bookings, most people still feel that it is ‘very difficult’ or ‘difficult’ to make reservations in this way. This could well be because of the very narrow time window in which users can book tickets, which means that many times people simply can’t book tickets unless they manage to navigate the entire long process in five minutes. Unfortunately not many people possess that kind of superhero web navigation skills!

Which brings to the next point…. give us all some refunds, dammit!