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Railway food in India has come under fire several times in the last few months, especially over quality and hygiene. In response to numerous complaints from passengers regarding the quality of food on long-distance trains, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is making a significant change. The base kitchens of Indian Railways will be replaced by cloud kitchens, with Mumbai being one of the first locations to experience this shift. Cloud kitchens have already been providing meal packets to trains for nearly a month.
Professionals and caterers are currently setting up these cloud kitchens, and around 200 are planned for IRCTC’s west zone, which includes Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. “In Mumbai the cloud kitchens will come up at Powai, Kurla, Panvel, Thane and Chembur,” said a senior IRCTC official. “Of these, the ones at Kurla are up and running while the others are at different stages. As of now, work on 90 such cloud kitchens is in progress, of which 50 are operational. We intend to get 200-odd kitchens ready in the next three months or so.”
The kitchen at Kurla, located on LBS Road, is the largest one, with a capacity to prepare and deliver 4,000 meals that include breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sources said the private operators running the kitchen would be responsible for delivering them to the pantry cars of long-distance trains in cold storage vans.
The cloud kitchens will be operated under a seven-year contract by various caterers. These kitchens will be equipped with the latest technology for food preparation and delivery, with CCTV surveillance ensuring cleanliness and hygiene are strictly maintained. This also means that Indian Railways will no longer rely on a single location for food production, such as the current base kitchens in Mumbai at CSMT and Mumbai Central, which produce 8,000 to 12,000 meals daily. IRCTC officials noted that cloud kitchens will provide more operational flexibility and reduce their dependence on base kitchens.
For years, Indian Railways has produced thousands of meals for long-distance trains, including high-end services like Rajdhani, Shatabdi, and Tejas Express, with base kitchens more recently supplying meals to Vande Bharat trains as well. Despite efforts to improve food quality, including live streaming kitchen operations, imposing fines between ₹5,000 and ₹5 lakh (introduced in November 2023), and even terminating contracts for poor hygiene, complaints about the quality of food persisted.
IRCTC was receiving an average of 300 to 350 complaints each month, with about 10 to 12 serious complaints involving foreign objects, insects, or other contaminants in the food. Currently, IRCTC operates 50 cloud kitchens, with 90 more in progress. These kitchens serve around 500 trains daily, preparing between 1,000 and 4,000 meals each day. This new approach marks a significant improvement in the quality and delivery of food on Indian Railways.
