The gross passengers travelled by IR is around 2 crores per day and out of that 1 crore passengers travel in suburban trains, 60 lakh passengers travel in Passengers trains and only 20 to 22 lakh passengers take Mail / Express /Superfast, Sathabdi, Rajdhani, Vande Bharat kind of long distance reserved trains. So putting a number of 5 percent travelling in AC out of 2 crore per day passengers is misplaced. Effectively out of 22 lakh long-distance reserved travellers around 10 lakh are travelling in AC class and 12 lakh are travelling non - AC ( sleeper and 2S) classes.
The...
more... Non-AC sleeper berths or coaches are getting replaced by 3A and 3E coaches as Indian Railways is unable to recover economic fares in SL class and was unable to increase ticket prices. The only way was to do Tatkal, dynamic pricing and increasing composition of AC class coaches.
The ultimate solution is to increase number of trains from daily average 2500 express trains (as of today) to 5000 express trains in next 3 to 5 years. This can be achieved mainly increasing speeds on key metro routes by using Push-Pull trains (Amrit Bharat trains) and Vande Bharat and VB sleeper coaches.
IR has to create additional long distance berths of around 30 lakhs, which means around 2000 to 2500 trains per day. The Railways has to come up with Clone trains and squeeze double number of Express train on every route or increase the track length by new lines, doubling, tripling and quadrupling etc. Based on demand of the route. Now EDFC abs WDFC is operational so around 500 additional trains can be made operation in Delhi -Mumbai and Delhi - Howrah corridors.