The recent intervention of the Supreme Court on railway travel insurance has exposed an inequality in India’s public transport system. It questioned why insurance is limited to online ticket buyers, highlighting a simple principle: access to safety cannot depend on access to technology. Today, passengers booking online can opt for insurance at just 45 paise, with coverage up to ₹10 lakh. Yet those who buy tickets at station counters—nearly 1.9 lakh reserved passengers every day—are denied the same option. This is a structural exclusion that leaves a huge section of passengers without even the choice of basic financial protection.
The Railways’ defence was based on difficulties in identifying counter passengers and preventing misuse. But that does not hold up. As the court pointed out, administrative inconvenience cannot justify unequal treatment. The tech-driven systems already rely on Aadhaar, mobile numbers and digital records. So, to say that it is difficult to identify passengers at ticket counters sounds less like a constraint. When tickets are issued, responsibility follows. Systems must adapt to ensure equal access, not avoid it.
This exclusion also falls hardest on those already disadvantaged. Nearly 89 percent of reserved tickets are booked online, but the remaining 11 percent still represents lakhs of journeys each year. These are often made by elderly passengers, rural users, the poor, and those without reliable internet access. In unreserved travel, where physical ticketing dominates and risks are higher, the absence of affordable insurance becomes even more serious. With over 21,000 railway-related deaths annually, mostly from falls, overcrowding and unsafe platforms, denying such passengers the insurance safeguard is difficult to justify. At the same time, insurance cannot be seen as the final answer. It deals with the aftermath, not the cause. Many of these deaths are predictable and preventable. They are the outcome of neglect rather than collisions and derailments, which are rare. Expanding insurance without addressing these shortcomings risks normalising loss.
The way forward is two-fold. Insurance must become available across all ticketing modes, with awareness efforts reaching those outside digital systems. Safety must simultaneously improve through better crowd control, stronger infrastructure and smarter use of technology. A transport system should not measure its success by how quickly it pays compensation after an incident. Equal risk demands equal protection, but it also demands fewer risks.