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New Delhi: The Indian Railways ’ punctuality score, or on-time performance of trains that ferry millions of people every day on the world’s busiest public transportation network, has fallen to 65% in the past three months, one of the lowest figures reported by railways in recent times.Until a few months ago, the Railways reported punctuality of 80% and above, which railway ministry officials claimed has also been the average score for the last one decade or so. During its research, ET couldn’t verify the lowest ever on-time performance of the 165-year-old national transporter.Currently, many long-route trains are running with delays of even up to 20 hours, causing huge inconvenience to passengers. Even the premier Champaran Humsafar train launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to celebrate 100 years of Mahatma Gandhi's Champaran Satyagraha in April 2018 is, on an average, running late by 12 hours.Railway Board chairman Ashwani Lohani had recently claimed that the punctuality scores dipped not only because of a high number of maintenance blocks but also because of implementation of automatic reporting through data loggers.Earlier reporting was done manually but after the change, instances of misreporting have fallen. Lohani had said that the railways now used data loggers to report punctuality and 90% of punctuality figures were auto generated through these loggers. Hence, they were completely genuine.However, a May 31 letter written by the efficiency department of the Railway Board to all general managers and seen by ET claims that these data loggers are operational only at 55 locations. The Indian railroad network has more than 8,000 stations across the country. A top official said that one the reasons for the increasing number of train delays is also the ongoing tussle between the two premier services of Indian Railways – the railway traffic and engineering services. The turf war has also led to cancellations of trains, causing the railways a revenue loss on a daily basis.The traffic service, responsible for the operation of trains, has blamed the engineering service, which is in charge of track and other maintenance related issues, of availing the blocks but not completing maintenance chores.Block is the amount of time when there is no train movement in certain stretches due to scheduled maintenance and safety related assignments. Officials said that the issue has also been raised with top decision-makers at the ministry.“Recently, a seven-hour block was taken in Delhi's Nizamuddin. However, no work was done. This has become frequent now. Also, different departments such as signalling and civil works take different maintenance blocks on the same routes,” a top traffic service official said.Officials have now proposed to annualised scheduled maintenance blocks so that the calendar for maintenance can be planned in advance. “This model has been tried in the Howrah division by the former divisional manager and it turned out to be successful. This can be replicated across the country,” the official added.Facing flak from passengers, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal had warned top officials, including the secretary rank zonal general managers at the public transporter, to improve punctuality to be eligible for promotions. Goyal, while addressing a recent railway conference, had said that he wanted to improve train safety without compromising much on punctuality.After the railway conference, Lohani wrote a social media post, blaming historical maintenance backlogs for train delays. “Sacrificing the long-term future for apparent short-term gains results in the spoiled present as well as the future… It is indeed foolish to think that tangible results can be produced out of thin air,” Lohani had said in the post.Lohani did not respond to email queries sent by ET seeking the reason for delays and whether any action was taken against officials responsible for not wrapping up the work on time, despite taking maintenance blocks on the super high-density routes.