CHENNAI: To mitigate the problem of non-availability of food on trains without pantry cars, Southern Railway with the help of IRCTC will be providing catering facilities through on board licensed suppliers.
Recently, Southern Railway general manager R K Kulshrestha held a meeting with IRCTC Director V Sriram and other officials to review the new initiatives of IRCTC improving the catering services and introducing initiatives for the benefit of passengers.
A press release said Southern railway has invited bids for setting up about 250 additional food stalls as a measure to ensure that quality food is available at stations.
Presently, 187 water vending machines are installed at different stations and further 120 will be set up in due course. Sixteen food plazas and nine fast food units operated by IRCTC provide quality food to passengers. Another eight Food Plazas and 25 fast food units will be established in the near future.
In order to address complaints over poor food quality, catering monitoring cell (Phone Number 044 - 25332545) has been established and available round-the-clock. In addition, Southern Railway will facilitate IRCTC initiative of providing cameras in the kitchens where the feed of the cameras can be seen online at IRCTC website.
Southern Railway is facilitating electronic payment at catering establishments so that passengers will have the option of non-cash payment. In all pantry cars, food bills can be paid through credit cards.
To provide transparency in transactions, IRCTC introduced “If no bill - Food is free’ and ‘No Tip’ campaign, which received a lot of appreciation from rail passengers, the release said.