Southern Railway orders enquiry into unreserved ticketing scam, suspends supervisor

Siddharth Prabhakar| TNN | Updated: Oct 3, 2016, 

Railway ticket (Representative image)

CHENNAI: Southern Railway has ordered an enquiry into a scam where ticket-booking clerks at Chennai Central and Egmore allegedly conned passengers who bought unreserved tickets. This action comes after the irregularities were brought out by a newspaper report a month ago.

A supervisor from the commercial department has also been suspended after a preliminary enquiry, ordered by chief commercial manager Ajeet Saxena.

Railway officials from the commercial department said that a few booking clerks at the Moore Market Complex and Egmore booking counters issued senior citizen tickets or half-ticket to passengers who bought these in bulk, say in groups of six to eight. Only half of the tickets would be regular ones and the unsuspecting passengers would not know the difference. The clerks allegedly pocketed the difference in the fare.

Each clerk involved earned around 10,000 per window per shift, a senior official in the commercial department said. The official said that muster rolls were manipulated to ensure that certain influential booking clerks would be able to work in shifts when the rush was high.

"This would be a few hours before the start of trains to Howrah or Trivandrum," he said.

Some of the counters were also being closed during rush hours so that people had to queue up before counters where the alleged scamsters would be on duty.

"During the preliminary enquiry, we discovered that these clerks would finish duty within three hours after minting their money," the officer added.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the scam would be of the magnitude of 20-30 lakhs per month.