Train reservation: Despite running hundreds of special trains during the festive season, passengers are facing difficulties in getting tickets. Meanwhile, the long waiting list in 300 trains is another proof of passengers’ trouble. Senior officials of Indian Railway said that 327 trains running currently have a waiting list. 

Railway Board Chairman recently said the number of tickets is being analyzed thoroughly to end the problem of the waiting list. He further said that planning is underway to run more trains on the busiest routes with a maximum waiting list. Extra trains can be operated on these routes after analyzing data

Indian Railways may also run clone trains on busy routes to end the problem of waiting passengers.

What is a clone train?

A clone train is the one running with the same number as the actual train. For example, New Delhi-Dibrugarh Rajdhani Express has all the seats got reserved and there is a long of waitlisted passengers too then it case Indian Railways will put another rake of the same train with the same number in order to provide confirm seats to waitlisted ticket-holders.

The waitlisted passengers will be informed about their berths in the clone train soon after the preparation of the reservation charts for the originally scheduled trains.

But this will pose a big challenge before Indian Railways as it will require additional rakes for running the clone trains. It is likely that Railways would try to run these clone trains from major cities initially.

Mean-while, India reported 38,310 new cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), another lowest in months, and 490 related deaths in the last 24 hours, according to the Union health ministry on Tuesday, which has taken the country’s tally to over 8.26 million. The number of active cases of the coronavirus disease also fell to 541,405 from 561,908 on Monday morning, data showed.

Last Tuesday, there were 36,470 daily Covid-19 cases. “Active Cases comprise only 6.83% of the total positive cases of the country. In a span of just two months, the percentage of active cases have reduced more than 3 times. On 3rd September, the percentage of active cases was 21.16%,” the health ministry had said in a release on Monday.

There were 45,321 confirmed cases in the country on Monday morning and, 80% of the new cases were from 10 states as Union territories. The ministry has said that Kerala surged to first place with 7,025 new cases while Delhi and Maharashtra, both reported more than 5,000 daily new infections.