Two new Amrit Bharat Express trains to be flagged off

Banaras–Pune and Ayodhya–Mumbai services take the fully non-AC Amrit Bharat fleet to 66.

What happened

• The Prime Minister will flag off two new Amrit Bharat Express trains on 28 April 2026: a daily Banaras–Hadapsar (Pune) service and a weekly Ayodhya–Mumbai (Lokmanya Tilak Terminus) service.
• Both link Uttar Pradesh with Maharashtra via Madhya Pradesh, threading three large States on a single corridor.
• The Banaras–Hadapsar run covers its route in roughly 30 hours with 18 stops (Prayagraj, Jhansi, Rani Kamlapati/Bhopal, Itarsi, Bhusaval, Jalgaon, Manmad, Ahilyanagar, Daund among them).
• The Ayodhya–Mumbai run takes about 28 hours with 12 stops (Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Prayagraj, Satna, Jabalpur, Itarsi, Bhusaval, Jalgaon, Nasik Road, Kalyan, Thane among them).
• With these additions, the total number of operational Amrit Bharat Express services rises to 66.
• The Railways frames the move as expanding affordable, long-distance travel for working families along a high-demand religious and migrant-labour corridor.

Background & context

The Amrit Bharat Express is a class of fully non-air-conditioned, long-distance superfast trains introduced by Indian Railways (Ministry of Railways) and rolled out from the 2023–24 period, with the first services flagged off in late 2023. It sits within the Government's broader railway-modernisation push that also produced the Vande Bharat (semi-high-speed) and Amrit Bharat Station Scheme families, all carrying the "Amrit" branding associated with the Amrit Kaal programming. The defining design choice is deliberate: where Vande Bharat targets faster, premium intercity travel, the Amrit Bharat is engineered to bring modern coach safety and comfort to the lowest fare bands — the General and Sleeper passengers who dominate India's long-haul migrant and pilgrimage routes.

The two services announced here sit on exactly that kind of route. The Banaras (Varanasi) and Ayodhya origins are major pilgrimage centres in eastern Uttar Pradesh; Pune and Mumbai are among the country's largest labour-absorbing metropolitan economies. The corridor between them carries heavy seasonal and migrant demand, which the non-AC General-plus-Sleeper configuration is built to serve at scale. Reaching 66 operational services marks steady fleet expansion since the type's introduction, rather than a single one-off launch.

It also helps to place the train within the wider modernisation effort it belongs to. The Indian Railways carries a daily ridership in the tens of millions, the overwhelming majority of whom travel in non-AC reserved and unreserved coaches; the policy challenge has long been that this mass-market segment was served by the oldest rolling stock even as new premium products were introduced. The Amrit Bharat is the Railways' attempt to break that pattern by designing a brand-new train around the non-AC traveller rather than retrofitting old coaches. The current rollout therefore complements two adjacent initiatives that often get confused with it — the Vande Bharat Express (the premium, semi-high-speed product) and the Amrit Bharat Station Scheme (a separate programme that redevelops stations) — and together they form the visible face of the Railways' present-day capacity and quality drive.

The route choices repay attention. Both services run on the existing electrified broad-gauge trunk network rather than on any dedicated high-speed alignment. The Banaras–Hadapsar service is routed through the heart of the Gangetic plain and central India — Prayagraj, Jhansi, Bhopal (Rani Kamlapati), Itarsi — before descending into Maharashtra via Bhusaval, Jalgaon, Manmad, Ahilyanagar and Daund. The Ayodhya–Mumbai service threads Sultanpur, Pratapgarh and Prayagraj in UP, then Satna, Jabalpur and Itarsi in MP, and finally Bhusaval, Jalgaon, Nasik Road, Kalyan and Thane on the approach to the Mumbai region. The shared spine through Itarsi and Bhusaval reflects how both routes funnel UP-and-MP demand onto the established central-India corridor toward Maharashtra's metros.

For Prelims

• What it is: Amrit Bharat Express — a category of fully non-AC, long-distance superfast passenger trains run by Indian Railways (Ministry of Railways).
• Class composition: only General (unreserved) and Sleeper coaches — no AC classes — explicitly targeted at low- and middle-income families.
• Traction — push-pull: two locomotives, one at each end of the rake. The rear loco pushes while the front pulls, which removes the time lost reversing the loco at terminals, improves acceleration and gives smoother starts and stops.
• Coupler & structure: jerk-free semi-automatic couplers (reducing the lurch between coaches) and a crashworthy coach design for better collision energy absorption.
• Onboard comfort: seats and berths inspired by the Vande Bharat Sleeper, a non-AC pantry, and Divyangjan-friendly facilities for passengers with disabilities.
• Safety & passenger systems: CCTV surveillance, emergency talk-back units, aerosol-based fire suppression, fully sealed gangways (dust- and noise-resistant inter-coach passages), and mobile charging with both USB Type-A and Type-C ports.
• The two new services: Banaras–Hadapsar (Pune) is daily, ~30 hrs, 18 stops; Ayodhya–Mumbai (LTT) is weekly, ~28 hrs, 12 stops; routing connects UP → MP → Maharashtra.
• Fleet count: total operational Amrit Bharat Express services now 66.
• The wider "Amrit" railway set it belongs to: the Amrit Bharat Express (non-AC trains), the Vande Bharat Express (semi-high-speed chair-car/sleeper trains), and the Amrit Bharat Station Scheme (station redevelopment) — three separate initiatives that share branding but differ in purpose.

How it compares to its closest peer — Vande Bharat: The two are the trains aspirants most often confuse, so the contrast matters. Vande Bharat is a semi-high-speed train fitted with KAVACH automatic train protection, automatic plug doors, reclining/revolving executive seats and a mini-pantry — and it carries AC accommodation (chair car, executive class, and in the Sleeper variant, AC sleeper berths). On the very same day, the Railways made a Mumbai–Ahmedabad Vande Bharat permanently 20 coaches, and noted that since 2019 Vande Bharat had served over 9.1 crore passengers across about 1 lakh trips. The Amrit Bharat, by contrast, is not semi-high-speed and carries no AC class at all; its purpose is affordability for General and Sleeper passengers, not premium speed. Both, however, share modern engineering touches — sealed gangways, CCTV, USB charging and crashworthy/jerk-reducing design.

Why it matters

India's railway-modernisation story has been dominated by the premium Vande Bharat, which by design serves shorter, AC, intercity travel at higher fares. That leaves a gap: the bulk of long-distance rail demand still comes from General and Sleeper passengers on overnight and multi-day journeys, often on pilgrimage and labour-migration corridors. The Amrit Bharat is the policy answer to that gap — it brings the newer-generation safety and comfort features (crashworthy bodies, jerk-free couplers, sealed gangways, fire suppression, CCTV, modern charging) into the cheapest fare classes, where rolling stock has historically been older. The push-pull configuration also has an operational payoff: by eliminating loco-reversal at terminals and improving acceleration, it raises utilisation and can trim run-times on congested routes. Routing these particular services to connect Banaras and Ayodhya with Pune and Mumbai targets a corridor of genuine, year-round demand, which is why the count climbing to 66 is presented as steady expansion rather than a symbolic launch.

The equity dimension is the heart of the case. A non-AC long-distance traveller has historically had little choice but older coaches with poorer ride quality and weaker safety provisioning; the Amrit Bharat narrows that gap by carrying features that, until recently, were associated with premium services. The presence of Divyangjan-friendly facilities extends the inclusion argument to passengers with disabilities. The safety stack — CCTV, emergency talk-back to the crew, aerosol fire suppression and crashworthy coach bodies — addresses two persistent risks on Indian long-distance services: onboard security for vulnerable passengers and survivability in the event of a collision. The jerk-free semi-automatic couplers and sealed gangways, meanwhile, are quality-of-journey upgrades that matter most precisely on the 28-to-30-hour runs these two services operate. In other words, the design specification is itself an argument about who modernisation is for.

For Mains