Vande Bharat surge
Vande Bharat trains carried about 3.98 crore passengers in FY 2025–26 — roughly a 34–36% year‑on‑year jump — and the service has now carried more than 9.1 crore passengers since launch. (That concentration of demand helps explain why Indian Railways keeps adding summer‑special capacity on major corridors.) ( )
Nearly 4 crore people rode Vande Bharat trains in India in the financial year that ended in March 2026, and that was about one-third higher than the year before. The Ministry of Railways said the network has now crossed 9.1 crore passengers since the service began. (thehindu.com) That jump is striking because Vande Bharat is not India’s everyday unreserved rail system. It is a reserved, fully air-conditioned, semi-high-speed service aimed mostly at city pairs that can be covered in under about 10 hours. (thehindu.com, wikipedia.org) The service started on February 15, 2019, with the New Delhi–Varanasi route. More than seven years later, that first corridor is still the busiest one, with over 73 lakh passengers carried so far. (pib.gov.in, indianexpress.com) The scale-up has been fast. The Railways says Vande Bharat has crossed one lakh trips since launch, which means the brand has moved from a showcase train to a regular part of the intercity timetable. (thehindu.com) Part of the appeal is time saved without flying. Vande Bharat trains are built as self-propelled trainsets, so they accelerate faster than many locomotive-hauled trains and can cut journey times on dense routes where airports are either slower door-to-door or more expensive. (pib.gov.in, wikipedia.org) Part of the appeal is also predictability. These trains are fully reserved, air-conditioned, and marketed as a cleaner and more premium experience, which helps explain why demand concentrates on business, pilgrimage, and family-travel corridors instead of spreading evenly across the whole rail network. (pib.gov.in, thehindu.com) That concentration shows up elsewhere in Indian Railways planning. When summer travel surges, the system adds special trains by the thousands of trips to clear rush demand, and high-demand premium corridors are exactly where extra capacity becomes politically and commercially hard to ignore. (pib.gov.in, thehindu.com) The next step is stretching the idea beyond daytime runs. Indian Railways introduced the Vande Bharat Sleeper service in January 2026, which points to the same strategy: use the brand that already works on busy daytime routes and push it into overnight long-distance travel. (newsonair.gov.in) So the story in the passenger numbers is not just popularity. It is that a train launched in 2019 as a flagship product is now pulling enough repeat demand to shape capacity decisions on some of India’s busiest intercity corridors. (thehindu.com, indianexpress.com)
