On Thursday, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) directed airline operators to refund the money paid by people who booked tickets between March 25 and April 14. These tickets were booked for travel from April 15 onwards. The directive came because airlines had refused people any refund on their payments.

The DGCA enabled beleaguered customers to claim a full refund without any additional cancellation charge. The announcement, of course, came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an extension of the lockdown till May 3.

On the other hand, without creating any fuss, the Indian Railways cancelled all bookings for travel made between March 25 and April 14, and refunded the entire amount to people who booked tickets, for travel between April 15 and May 3, thinking rail services would resume April 15 onwards.

All passenger trains came to a halt on March 24. (Photo: Reuters)

Most ordinary people knew that the lockdown would be extended. But the extraordinary officials at Indian Railways did not. Two problems resulted from the optimism of Indian Railways.

First, people had to pay a gateway charge of Rs 18, despite ticket cancellations and full refunds. A payment gateway is basically a software application. It acts as a conduit between an eCommerce website and the bank that authorises - or declines - a customer's payment. IRCTC has its own payment gateway, through which the tickets were bought online.

Rs 18 may be an insignificant amount for many. It may mean a lot to people walking back home or forced to stay put in temporary shelters. The Railways booked 39 lakh tickets in this period. Multiply this figure by 18 and you have about Rs 7 crore that cannot be refunded.

The public relations department of Indian Railways says they looked for ways to refund even this money, but it was technically not possible.

In 2019, the total capital outlay for the Indian Railways was Rs 1.6 lakh crore. Rs 7 crore is not even peanuts in comparison. There is no way this could have been a scam, but it would be impossible to deny that this was a case of mismanagement.

And that brings us to the second problem this mismanagement resulted in – more mismanagement. Thousands of people poured out in Bandra next to the railway station. There are WhatsApp rumours, saing trains were leaving from Mumbai, being blamed for the trouble, but there was reason for people to blame the rumours because why else would Railways have allowed bookings?

States were announcing lockdown extensions even before Modi announced it, but Indian Railways was clueless about the rise in the number of cases. This was strange given that the department has itself been doing some exemplary work to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

Trains were turned into hospitals in no time after the department closed, the largest in Asia, closed its services for the first time in 167 years.

A train coach turned into a hospital ward. (Photo: Indian Railways)

The world’s fourth-largest rail operator and India’s biggest employer started the work on converting 20,000 old train carriages into isolation wards for Covid-19 patients, even as it kept running the goods trains.

It is assessing the feasibility of making hospital beds, stretchers, masks, sanitisers, and medical apparatus such as ventilators. But this one glitch reflects badly on Indian Railways.

The authorities knew it wasn’t possible to open train services on April 15 and yet it booked tickets. That it is a government-owned service makes the blunder reflect poorly on India’s preparedness to deal with the crisis. It shows a lack of coordination among the various arms of the government.

This is not a mistake the government can afford to make at this point.

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