The Central Railway (CR) has caught 2.38 lakh ticketless travellers since June 15 last year, when the suburban services trains first resumed. The authorities collected Rs 7.61 crore as fine for ticketless travelling till February. This includes fines collected both on the suburban and outstation trains. According to the CR officials, cases of ticketless travelling have gone up, as buses are overcrowded and commuting by road takes a lot of time.
“About 1.75 lakh cases were detected in suburban trains and Rs 5.10 crore has been collected as fine. Rs 2.51 crore has been collected from 63,000 cases in outstation trains,” said Shivaji Sutar, chief PRO, CR.
The number of people commuting by trains has gone up to almost 25 lakh now. “It used to be between 5 lakh to 7 lakh, when it was meant for only those in essential services. Over the months, this number has gone up substantially. In fact now, even though there are fixed timings for common people, we catch many who travel illegally when they are not permitted to travel,” said a CR official.
Since February 1, people who are not in essential services were permitted to travel in local trains before 7am, between 12pm and 4pm and after 9pm. However, this rule is barely followed as private and government offices have still not opted for staggered work hours despite the pandemic. In outstation trains, irregularities like the misuse of senior citizen quota, travelling on altered tickets, improper conversion of system generated tickets to e- tickets, travelling with a coloured photocopy of tickets, travelling with fake ID cards and transfer of ticket cases were mainly noticed during the drives.
