FoodPanda, the online food discovery and delivery service has partnered with the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), to deliver food orders to train travellers. According to the arrangement, travellers will get an option of ordering their meals 2 hours before their scheduled train journeys and FoodPanda will deploy its own delivery fleet to complete all orders. Passengers will also get an option of paying online for their meals along with the Cash on Delivery (CoD) option. The FoodPanda-IRCTC tie-up will first open to passengers travelling via the New Delhi Railway Station, post which the scheme will be rolled out in other cities like Chennai, Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore.
IRCTC also has tie-ups with other restaurant vendors like McDonalds, KFC, Dominoes, Haldiram, Hello Curry, etc, as a part of 'Station based e-catering service'. The service for getting food deliveries from these restaurants was initiated back in October for all trains passing through 45 specific stations, which include- New Delhi, Allahabad, Kanpur Central, Lucknow, Varanasi, Chennai Central, Mumbai Central, Delhi, Bangalore, Madurai, Amritsar, Thiruvananthapuram Central, Chandigarh and more. The service will be available only for the trains halted at the station and not for moving trains.
Meals from the 'e-catering' scheme can be ordered from www.ecatering.irctc.co.in or by calling 0120-2383892-99/ 1800-1034-139 (toll free). Passengers also have an option of initiating the order process through an SMS to 139 with details of their PNR and seat number.