IRCTC hits 5% upper circuit as booking for train reservation to resume

Shares of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) were locked in the upper circuit band of 5 per cent at Rs 1,302.85 apiece on the BSE in the early trade on Monday after Ministry of Railways announced that the Indian Railways will gradually restart passenger train operations from May 12, initially with 15 pairs of trains.

Till 09:52 am, a combined 79,000 equity shares changed hands and there were pending buy orders for a combined 1.1 million shares on the NSE and BSE. 

Since March 2, the stock of IRCTC has slipped 27.5 per cent (as of Friday's close) as compared to a 17 per cent decline in the S&P BSE Sensex. 

Booking for reservation in these trains will start at 4 pm on May 11 and will be available only on the IRCTC website. Ticket booking counters at railway stations will remain closed and no counter tickets (including platform tickets) will be issued, it said.

These trains will be run as special trains from New Delhi station connecting Dibrugarh, Agartala, Howrah, Patna, Bilaspur, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Madgaon, Mumbai Central, Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi.

All passenger train services were suspended due to a lockdown announced on March 25. After the resumption of these 15 services, railways will start more special services on new routes, based on the available coaches after reserving 20,000 coaches for Covid-19 care centres and adequate number of coaches being reserved to enable operation of up to 300 trains everyday as “Shramik Special” for stranded migrants.

Meanwhile, shares of Ircon Interntational were also trading over 5 per cent higher at Rs 87.80 apiece on the BSE. In comparison, the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex was trading 603 points or nearly 2 per cent higher at 32,245.22 levels.