PATNA: Although railway minister Mamata Banerjee has assured to take steps for providing fresh and quality food on running trains, bonafide pas-sengers travelling by the prestigious trains like Rajdhani and other mail and express trains are still suffering due to supply of sub-standard food.
The railways has given the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Cor-poration (IRCTC) the responsibility of supplying quality food to passen-gers during their journey on running trains.
Recently, one Ravi Sekhar was travelling in the AC-3 coach of New Delhi-Patna Rajdhani Express (2310) along with two other passengers. They were served vegetarian meals on trains. Surprisingly, the meals were stale, insufficient in quantity and bad in taste.
Irked over it, he lodged a complaint with the catering staff on duty.
Talking to TOI, he said that if such kind of meals can be served to elite class of passengers in Rajdhnai Express, needless to say about the meals being served to passengers in other long-distance trains.
“I do not know the fate of my complaint,” he said.
Similarly, Sumit, Rahul and Pankaj were travelling in the sleeper coach of Patna-Bangalore Sanghmitra Express last week. They were served meals which were not hygienic and insufficient in quantity. Besides, the meals were stale.
While the pantry car employees did not provide them complaint book, they were not given bill as well.
When asked about the bills, the pantry car staff ignored it simply on the ground that bill book was not available with them, they said.
According to Sumit, he could not eat the rotten meal and the whole night he lived on water and tea only. He felt nauseating the moment he took a morsel of food.
Atul and Bittu, who were recently travelling by the New Delhi-Patna Sampoorna Karnti Express, said that they found meals were not up to the mark. Even the curd served to them was sour.
They verbally lodged com-plaint with the pantry car staff, they said, adding there was no fixed price of food item served to passengers on running trains.
Meanwhile, a senior IRCTC official in New Delhi said that the IRCTC would look into these complaints now. A drive would be launched on im-portant mail and express trains to check quality of food, he said.