For Malayalis in Bengaluru, travelling to their home towns in north Kerala for Onam celebrations continues to be an ordeal.
A large majority of Keralites in the Karnataka capital are from Kannur, Kozhikode, Malappuram, and Palakkad districts. Tickets are, as usual, not available in the Yeshwantpur-Kannur Express, the only daily train service to this part of the State, and the Southern Railway has not announced any special train so far. Finding seats in buses run by the Kerala State Road Transport Service Corporation (KSRTC) is near impossible.
The other daily train, Bengluru City-Mangaluru-Kannur Express, travels via Yeshwantpur, Hassan, and Mangaluru and is not convenient for those who come to places such as Kozhikode, Tirur, and Shornur.
N.V. Vijayakumar, a native of Malappuram and resident of Bengaluru for the past one-and-half-decades, said on Monday that the authorities had not been addressing the concerns of travellers from Kerala for long. Those who could not visit Kerala for Onam in the past two years due to COVID-19 had hoped that they could make it this year. Their hopes have been dashed, he pointed out.
C.E. Chakkunni, working president, Confederation of All-India Rail Users’ Association, said the Railway authorities had promised to extend the Bengaluru City-Mangaluru-Kannur Express to Kozhikode in November last year. But it had remained on paper, he added.
The Yeshwantpur-Mangaluru Central Express, a weekly train that travels by Palakkad, is not convenient for the passengers. It starts service at 11.55 p.m. on Sundays and reaches Kozhikode at 11.50 a.m. the next morning and 1.22 p.m. at Kannur, and culminates at Mangaluru at 4.05 p.m. In the return journey, it starts at 11.35 p.m. from Mangaluru and reaches Yeshwantpur at 1 p.m. the next day. “They have declared special trains to other parts of the State, but not to Malabar. The request to add more compartments to the Yeshwantpur-Kannur Express too have not been considered,” he alleged. Mr. Chakkunni also claimed that the charge for Tatkal and Premium Tatkal services were often higher than air fares.
Meanwhile, M.K. Raghavan, Kozhikode MP, has urged the General Manager, Southern Railway, to run special trains from metro cities such as Bengaluru to Malabar to help the passengers. He pointed out that the Thiruvananthapuram division was allowed to run one special train along with the 11 existing services to Bengaluru. “It is difficult to get reservation tickets in KSRTC buses, and private buses were exploiting the passengers by coming up with exorbitant charges,” he added.
