Lumding division recovers highest-ever penalty of INR 7.4 lakh from ticketless travellers in single day

Dimapur, May 22 (EMN): Passengers who travel for short distance with unreserved ticket, often board reserved compartments of mail/express trains causing inconvenience to bona-fide travellers and loss of revenue for railways. To address this issue, Lumding division had recently adopted a new strategy to detect and discourage travellers with improper tickets. The chief public relations officer, NF Railway in Maligaon, stated that in a synchronised operation, 39 Travelling Ticket Examiners (TTEs) were deployed in different trains running between Lumding – Guwahati, Lumding – Furkating and Lumding – Badarpur – Agartala sections on April 28. At the same time Ticket Collectors at all stations were also activated. This resulted in detection of 1116 cases of people travelling with improper ticket or without ticket. From these people a record amount of INR 7, 41,167 was realised. In this operation, three groups of TTEs based in Guwahati, one group based in Lumding and one group based in Badarpur were activated simultaneously to cover maximum number of trains. As a result many passengers with short-distance unreserved ticket travelling in reserved coaches were caught and penalised. Such drives are expected to discourage ticketless travel, thereby reducing the inconvenience to passenger travelling in reserved coaches, especially in sleeper classes, and enable them to travel comfortably. With the success of the strategy, it is now being decided to extend it to other divisions as well.