LUCKNOW: Visuals of passengers travelling in Varanasi bound Vande Bharat, asking the on-board catering staff to take back untouched food trays which allegedly had stale meal went viral on social media platform X.
Two visuals of the incident was shared on January 6 night by a X user identified as Akash Keshari (@akash24188), expressing his disappointed with a caption that read, “Hi sir I am in journey with 22416 from NDLS to BSB.Food that was served now is smelling and very dirty food quality. Kindly refund my all the money.. These vendor are spoiling the brand name of Vande Bharat express (sic).” In the tweet, Keshari had tagged railway ministry and the minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
One of the visual showed, that passengers were asking the catering staff to take back the food trays away, while in another visual, Keshari claimed that food served to passengers was emitting foul smell with a close-up shot of the meal packed in aluminum foil.

Though the visuals caught the attention of Railways Seva, who assured Keshari, that the complaint had been officially registered on RailMadad. However, the IRCTC official X handle responded to Keshari’s tweet on Thursday afternoon, which already had gain traction with nearly 50,000 impressions and 154 retweets and 88 comments.
At around 4:27 pm (Thursday), the IRCTC wrote that, ” Sir, our sincere apologies for the unsatisfactory experience you had. The matter is viewed seriously. A suitable penalty has been imposed on the service provider. Further the service provider staff responsible have been disengaged and the licensee has been suitably instructed. The monitoring of the on-board services has been further strengthened. (sic)”
Meanwhile, in comments, several users recalled similar incidents.
“The food in all the trains is of poor quality, including Shatabdi, Rajdhani, Tejas. As a regular traveller of Indian Railways, I have seen the quality of food going downwards in recent years. One now has the option of booking a ticket without meal with a small reduction in fare, (sic)” wrote Sudhanshu Mishra @Sudhanshu1, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management Lucknow.
Another user Rishabh Trivedi @RishTri95 wrote, “

ab gobar sidhe train me serve kiya ja rha hai …. log paise dekr gobar kha rhe hai.

”