Women to get more seats in local trains

Women to get more seats in local trains

PUNE: Fulfilling the long standing demand of women commuters travelling between Pune and Lonavla, the Pune Railway Division has decided to provide more seats to women commuters by converting the general coach into ‘ladies only’ coach in the near future. 

The decision certainly has created a wave of happiness among women commuters who feel that with this decision, their journey will become a little more comfortable.

Local trains running between Pune and Lonavla section are always packed with commuters during peak hours. There are 42 trips of a local train every day (21 trips from each side) and average one lakh passengers travel by these trains. At present, there are three second-class women’s coaches which have 86, 74 and 74 seats respectively and 39 seats are reserved in first class for women. The Railways has decided to replace the unreserved second class coach into ‘ladies only’ coach.

“Women passengers were requesting the Railways that there are not enough seats for them,” said a senior officer from the Pune Railway Division.

In the first class coach which is reserved for women, it was noticed that those have the second class ticket or monthly pass generally travel in the first class. Hence, the decision has been taken recently that a second class unreserved coach in which both men and women travel, will be now reserved only for women, but it will be only for one month on an experimental basis,” the official added.

The officer said that earlier there were 234 seats reserved for women in three second-class coaches, now after replacing the unreserved coach and converted into ‘only for ladies’ coach, it will add 62 more seats. 

It means there will be 296 seats available for women commuters.

“The decision has taken and we have already started working on it. The marking of ‘ladies only’ in the coach will take some time. We are hopeful that the facility will start from the first week of December,” said the officer.

Athulya Sridhar, a regular commuter, said “This is a very welcome move. Although, there are a lot of women commuters, there were only three women’s compartments in the local train, which caused a lot of inconvenience. She further added, “When I used to get inside the general local bogie, many male passengers would look at us as if we are aliens. With this new bogie, I hope women passengers  will get some relief.”

Another regular passenger Snehal Pathak said,” We are really happy with this decision. As women passengers, we were facing a lot of space issues. It was a long pending demand as there is an equal number of male and female passengers but the number of seats for women were less.”

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