Indian Railways Passengers May Soon Have to Bid Goodbye to IRCTC

The Indian Government is looking at ways to increase its railway services’ reach to the public. With the current government, there have been several changes and new services introduced to the public in a bid to increase IRCTC’s popularity and now its look as though the state-owned Railways Company will be rebranded.

Potential Rebranding

The state-owned train operator, IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) is a household name already as is the only authorized Railway service provider in the country. Despite this, the government is looking to rebrand the name in a bid to make it sound more “catchy” and stick with the younger generation. According to media reports, the current Railway Minister Piyush Goyal has instructed his team and department to look for alternate names for the Railways Company in a rebranding exercise.

There are reports suggesting that the Railway Minister is having a tough time recollecting the organization’s name and is of the opinion that this is the case with most people in the country.

Online Campaign:

In fact, this isn’t the first instance that the government has thought about rebranding the name of the Railway Operator. Towards the beginning of this year, the Railway Ministry had launched a drive online, where it had asked people to come up with an innovative and catchy name for the service. The drive was termed as “COIN a NEW NAME” and was conducted in the form of a contest.

This was available to all members of the public and could be accessed from the website www.mygov.in. The drive seemed to have brought a decent amount of success as there were a total of 1,852 respondents who had submitted their suggestions.

Coin a new name contest

The IRCTC’s campaign was launched and it had announced that a winner would get a cash price of Rs. 1 lakh once the result is announced. The official statement from the Railway Company read “A clarion call to all our countrymen! Participate in the IRCTC “COIN A NEW NAME” Contest. The best entry attracts a cash prize of Rs 1,00,000 /- (INR ONE LAKH)”. So a lucky winner from the 1852 applicants gets the chance to win this cash.

Until recently, nothing was heard about the drive or its outcome with no news or prize announced for the winner. But now an official has come out and said that close to 700 names have been shortlisted by the government. A senior IRTCT official commented that “The first level committee has selected around 700 names.

The list has been sent to the second level committee for taking the final call and selects one name.