After the Maharashtra government allowed the general public to travel in local train from February 1, long queues of passengers outside booking offices were witnessed on Monday.
Despite the Central and Western railways opening all of their booking offices for passengers, long queues were seen outside of several stations in Mumbai including Kurla, Dadar, Andheri, Kandivali, Vasai and Nalasopara.
On Friday, the Maharashtra government had approved citizens, to commute by local trains in different time slots. According to the government advisory, the passenger can travel between 12pm and 4pm, post 9pm till the last train service of the day, and from the first train service of the day till 7am. However, there was no crowding inside local train compartments.
Reportedly, Railway has made provision of extending the validity of season tickets to the number of days lost due to lockdown by revalidating the season ticket on production of their season ticket. And this led the public to rush to railway stations to get their passes’ validity extended.
Also, the authority has allowed booking the ticket through the UTS app mobile application. The commuters have to update the new version of UTS app and click on the option of sync active tickets so that their season ticket will extend automatically up to the number of days lost.
The government has shut the Mumbai local train services from March 21 in the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic. However, later on, June 15, the authority had allowed essential service and emergency staffs to travel in Mumbai local train.
Meanwhile, Mumbai reported 483 new COVID-19 cases, 244 recoveries and eight deaths on Sunday, taking the total number of cases in the financial capital to 3, 08,969. According to the civic body official, there are 5,797 active cases and 2,90,913 patients have completely recovered so far.
