Indian Railways’ catering, ticketing and hospitality arm IRCTC has tied up with ITC, Tata Group and Harvest Gold to revamp its food offering. This follows the collaboration with food aggregating platform Zomato announced in September last year.

“We are serving over 1.6 million meals a day. For about a month, we are doing trials for the new offering. We constantly take feedback from the customers, and based on their inputs, we keep on improving our menu,” Sanjay Kumar Jain, chairman and managing director said. However, he did not elaborate on the contours of the new alliancess. IRCTC’s joint venture with Zomato – “Zomato – Food Delivery in Trains” – is catering to thousands of consumers and the services are currently available in close to 90 towns, and over 100 railway stations.

Kumar said around 63% of IRCTC”s purchases of goods and servicesare from the micro and small enterprises (MSEs). “This is way above the mandated 25% as per the public procurement policy of the government. Within the policy, there’s a mandate to procure 3% from MSEs owned by women. We are well above that number,” said Jain.

IRCTC is one of the biggest procurers of goods from MSMEs, in comparison to its total procurement budget. For instance, the state-run company procured Rs 134.23 crore (63.02%) of goods and services from MSEs in FY24. In comparison, other central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) procured 43.7% of their requirements from MSEs in FY24, as per MSME Sambandh portal. In FY25, the share has gone down to 40.72% though.

“The procurement policy says that preference should be given to MSEs in the tendering process. Plus, they don’t have to pay EMD (earnest money deposit), and registration charges,” said Jain said at a PHDCCI event on Thursday.

For instance, as per the policy, MSEs quoting price within price band L-1 plus 15%, when L1 is from someone other than MSE, shall be allowed to supply at least 25% of tendered value at L-1 subject to lowering of price by MSEs to L-1.

Experts said that the industry associations have specialised taskforce to push MSEs to increase their share in procurement of PSU contracts. “The industry is doing extensive handholding of MSMEs where they are trying to connect them with ministries and PSUs because there’s still a huge scope to increase the share of MSMEs in public procurement,” said an industry association spokesperson.