Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is soon going to come up with advanced services to comfort the rail passengers. In the mode of up gradation of existing services, IRCTC on Monday announced that it would soon introduce new services which include Passenger insurance and Unreserved Ticketing.
Arun Kumar Manocha, Chairman and Managing Director of IRCTC in a statement said, “We are going to start passenger insurance soon and have already issued letter of award. We have short-listed three companies. The insurance would be less than Rs 2 per trip for a sum insured of Rs 10 lakh.”
According to the reports, among a huge list, three leading insurance providers of the nation are short-listed-Shriram General, Royal Sundaram and ICICI Lombard General Insurance. Insurers will provide ‘Travel insurance’ to the rail passengers. This travel insurance is the amount paid to the passengers in addition to the compensation paid by Indian Railways to the reserved or ticket holders in case of any accidents.
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“At the moment, the insurance offer is under integration process, and we expect it will be operationalised from September,” said Manocha. Currently, only airlines in the nation provide such travel insurance to their passengers while reserving the tickets. Sanjay Datta, Chief-underwriting and claims at ICICI Lombard, said that the insurance coverage would be against accident, disabilities and hospitalisation too.
The other plans of the IRCTC initiatives include Unreserved Ticketing feature on the official website. The feature is not yet clear but is expected to start in the month of September. If we remember, earlier an exclusive app for booking unreserved tickets was introduced by IRCTC.
On Friday, IRCTC and State Bank of India partnered to add an e-wallet ‘Buddy’ that allows passengers to make digital payments during booking of tickets. He said that the e-wallet should be launched by Dussehra or Diwali in October.
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Manocha said that IRCTC works with several private and public sector institutions and Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI)-Mysore and Institute of hotel management, Catering and Nutrition-Pusa, New Delhi to provide better services to the passengers
Manocha also stated that they are working on to integrate Android software into IRCTC, which makes the cancellation of tickets and refund of amount easy. Besides he also stated that “The failure for card payment is only 2-3 per cent because of the pathway issues. We are hoping to launch e-wallet in the renewed form. It will be made free for the first three months. Currently, it is linked to the pan card and it will also be linked to the Aadhaar card soon.”
