OREANDA-NEWS. August 08, 2011. In order to improve its financial health, Railways are continuously striving to augment traffic earnings and containing the expenditure to the possible extent, reported the press-centre of Indian Railways.

For further improvement in earnings, the initiatives taken under freight business segment include plans to improve throughput through increased productivity and efficiency, reduction in wagon turn around time, increasing carrying capacity of wagons, notification of high capacity (2.5 tonnes)routes for carrying additional traffic of bulk commodities, distance based surcharge on iron ore for export co-related with the international price of iron ore, dynamic pricing policy for talking advantage in the skew in demand for traffic like levy of busy season charge, development charge, terminal charge, busy route surcharge for traffic to Pakistan and Bangladesh etc. and introduction of more attractive Freight Incentive Scheme for remaining and attracting additional traffic. 

Initiatives under passenger and parcel business segments include extension of Passenger Reservation System (PRS) and Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) facilities to more and more location, speeding up of trains, review of trains with low patronage, deployment of additional coaches in well patronized trains, vigorous checking of ticket less travelling, additional leasing of parcel space in certain nominated trains, leasing of vacant compartment of guard in front of SLR coach etc.

On the expenditure side, Railway is striving to improve productivity by better man-power planning, assets utilization, inventory management, fuel consumption etc. and controlling expenditure through number of austerity/economy measures.

Indian Railways works out excess/shortfall.  The excess generated by Indian Railways during 2005-06 to 2009-10 is given as under :

2005-06 Rs. 6193.32 crore
2006-07  Rs. 10206.32  crore 
2007-08  Rs. 13431.09 crore
2008-09  Rs. 4456.78 crore
2009-10  Rs. 0.75 crore

The main reason for reduction “Excess” in the years 2008-09 and 2009-10 is the implementation of the recommendations of VI Central Pay Commission.