New Delhi: The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) released new draft rules as part of its citizens’ charter on Tuesday that seems to indicate that PM Narendra Modi is serious about helping people wearing “hawaai chappals (bathroom slippers) fly in hawaai jahaaz (aeroplanes).” As an unintended consequence, railway passengers may have been reduced to second class travellers as many of them would have to pay cancellation fee more than that charged by airlines if the new rules are approved.
Among other things, the draft charter suggests radical intervention in regulating cancellation charges of domestic air tickets which for long have been termed as exorbitant and irrational by air passengers. It proposes that airlines cannot levy any cancellation charge on a passenger if the ticket is cancelled within 24 hours of booking it. This 24-hour lock-in policy would allow passengers to either cancel or make changes to their ticket without paying any money to the airline. However, this 24-hour lock-in policy would be available only to those travellers who have booked tickets at least four days (or 96 hours) from their date of travel. So for instance if a person books a ticket at 9 a.m. on Monday to travel on a flight before 9 a.m. on Friday, he can cancel or modify his ticket before 9 a.m. on Tuesday and get back the entire booking amount.
This effectively means that railway passengers, most of whom are economically worse off than air travellers, will now have to pay higher cancellation fee than air travellers.
A passenger travelling in the lowest class of travel in an unreserved compartment has to pay Rs 30 as cancellation fee if he decides to cancel his ticket. Those traveling in second class with an unreserved or a waitlisted ticket have to pay Rs 60 as cancellation charge. For passengers traveling with a confirmed ticket, the cancellation charges are even higher. These charges were doubled by the Modi administration in 2015. For cancelling a confirmed ticket upto two days before travel, the Indian railways charges Rs 120, Rs 180, Rs 200 and Rs 240 for second class sleeper, third AC, second AC and first AC respectively. Even cancelling a confirmed ticket for a non-sleeper second class compartment costs a railway passenger Rs 60. For tickets that are cancelled between two days to 12 hours of the train’s departure, 25 per cent of the ticket cost is recovered. For tickets cancelled within 12 hours of a travel, the passenger has to forfeit half his ticket price. The railways do not refund any money to passengers who cancel their ticket less than four hours from a train’s departure.
25/05/18 Sai Manish/Business Standard
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