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Earlier, Railway officials had said the tatkal scheme, used by Lalu to earn railways more than Rs 1,000 crore in the past three years, has failed to impress Mamata and she may prune the scheme. But Mamata has let it stay. Originally, tatkal was about allocating a few berths to those who had not booked in advance, but needed to travel even if at a higher cost.
Under Lalu Prasad, the Tatkal scheme took on a big dimension, almost turning into a revenue spinner when the former railway minister, in keeping with his populist leanings, would not touch fares and had to rationalise freight to cope with the competition from truck operators.
Railway officials acknowledge that the scope of tatkal has far exceeded what it was supposed to be and they were dreading losing a source of revenue.
They say that under Lalu's scheme, the revenue shot up remarkably as the number of tatkal berths went up. While the number of berths in tatkal every day in all trains put together was a little over 40,000 in 2005-06, in the past three years, it reached almost a lakh.
During the same period, the revenue earned through tatkal has gone up from over Rs 200 crore in 2006 to over Rs 500 crore in the last fiscal. In 2007-2008, it was over Rs 350 crore. Initially, there would be a single, separate coach for tatkal, but Lalu's brainchild led to introduction of tatkal berths even in regular coaches.
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