Govt to continue bearing service charge - Fusion - WeRIndia

After demonetization, many people in the country are forced to shift to online transactions. In this scenario, some service providers either reduced or withdrawn service charges to encourage them to digital mode of payments.

IRCTC is also among one of them which had withdrawn service charges as it was asked by the government.

Initially, the government had given the instructions not to charge it for e-ticket services till June 3 2017. However, it had been revised several times till date.

This decision led to a huge drop in the revenue of Railways on the sale of e-tickets.

The service charge ranged from ₹20 to ₹40 on non-AC tickets and AC tickets respectively.

In this situation, Indian government decided to bear the burden of service charges on e-tickets. In this way it wants to encourage the passengers to book tickets online and offset the losses of Railways.

This support was assured to meet its revenue losses until the Railways is allowed to charge for e-ticketing services.

For 2017-18, the reimbursements to IRCTC was ₹88 crore. The government wants to continue its support for the year 2018-19 and would pay ₹120 crore.

Indian government has been pushing the people to move toward digitalization especially since after the announcement of demonetization in November, 2016. Hence, constant efforts have been made by it to reduce the cost of online payments.

The exemption of service charge encouraged several passengers to book their tickets online as there is no need to wait in the long-standing queues to buy their tickets over the counter.

In addition to that, Railways has been trying to improve their passengers’ satisfaction. The integration of i-Pay app is one such initiative. This app improved the payment options for booked tickets on IRCTC portal.

This app has recently granted PCI-DSS certification and is expected to be functional completely by August this year.

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