CR cracks down on touts and benami ticket holders

April 10: The Central Railway (CR) is on the lookout for passengers who do not exist. In a crackdown against benami ticket holders, a CR adv...

April 10: The Central Railway (CR) is on the lookout for passengers who do not exist. In a crackdown against benami ticket holders, a CR advertisement, splashed across city newspapers, have listed 105 passengers under 21 confirmed tickets and asked them to report to railway authorities by April 17.

The carrot being offered: confirmed tickets and an apology for inconvenience caused; and the stick, cancellation of the tickets. However, authorities are certain that there will not be any need for apologies since such people do not exist.

From the start of bookings for the summer season, the CR has resorted to sample checking of confirmed tickets issued at its counters to verify the addresses and phone numbers put in by applicants. A special squad of 12 officers of the Vigilance and Commercial sections sifts through more than 3,000 requisition forms used to purchase tickets. “The officers are selected on the basis of their experience in crime prevention of these types. They have all had 15 years ofexperience in the field,” said a CR spokesperson on the composition of the team. The other qualification is that a team member must know the city very well. A form which the team earmarks as `suspicious’ is then checked for its veracity by another team.

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“Generally, addresses given are found to be false. No such person lives in that building nor has any neighbour heard of such person,” added the spokesperson. Phone numbers have also been dialled only to find that no passenger by that name is available on that number.

Presently, the checks are restricted only to those tickets issued between 8 and 8.15 am since February 10, the day bookings for the summer season took off. “It has been our experience that reservations for trains, which bear a heavy load, fill up all the 800-900 seats within these 15 minutes,” the spokesperson said. Moreover, checking all the requisition slips would not be possible due to the sheer number of tickets sold. At the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus reservations counters, morethan 10,000 tickets are sold every day. However, the CR denied the possibility of connivance of booking clerks in selling benami tickets. “Confirmed tickets are booked when seats are available. There is no way that clerks can verify addresses at that time,” claimed the spokesperson.