I don't have any detailed info on this but I do know that there are 2 committees namely DRUCC (Divisional Railway User I am not recalling the Full form of middle C in this) and ZRUCC (Zonal Railway User as same as DRUCC but on a zonal level).
Yes member of these are selected on RB/Zonal/Divisional level. And They have atleast annual meetings with the railway officials not sure about the meeting with ministry.
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Some of them do have some amount of power to make their demands gets fulfilled due to some political influence but most of them do not hold any power they just go there and put the demands on the table. Them being implemented or not is whole another thing.
I don't know Why newspaper keeps referring these 2 only I have some idea of Nagesh Namjoshi since he was close to Sumitra Taai so his demands directly went to Ministry. Not sure about the other.
I tried to contact the DRUCC/ZRUCC member from Bhopal but I didn't get the proper contacts and methods to meet him.
The main motive of these people are, you can say they act as a representatives of the Passengers or in their term Railway Users. The job of these person is to be the voice of passengers in front of Railway official so that Railway can improve their service towards passenger or user section of Railways.
But I think most of them don't have the technical insight of working of Railways and they certainly do not have (most of them) the kind of details that we RFs posses.