Chennai: It was 7.30 am. Nearly 100 people were seated on benches outside the railway passenger reservation system counters at the Moore Market Complex (MMC) in Chennai Central. Some were speaking on their phones, mentioning the names of places, train timings and ticket fares. A couple of RPF constables at the entrance of the booking centre answered queries from those filling out forms. Then at 8 am, the people rose from their seats and queued up, waiting for the counters to open. The booking clerks arrived, settling down in their seats while receiving calls or checking messages on their phones.
The counters opened and transactions began. The first in line, considered the ‘luckiest’, handed over his application form to the clerk, who appeared to feed data into the computer and then reached out to the printer as he kept up the chatter with the man in the queue.
The first ticket of the day had been booked, but it was not handed over to the man in the queue. Instead, it went straight into the booking clerk’s drawer to be later handed over to a tout.
Though the man in the queue did get his ticket subsequently, it was only after the clerk had printed the same ticket twice.
Booking clerks, touts and travel agents have evolved many such novel methods to con the ordinary traveller, waiting in a queue to reserve a train ticket, and also make a quick buck on the side.
Ahead of a busy Deepavali season, DC caught up with many serving booking clerks of Southern Railway who conceded that a sizeable number of tickets were unavailable to travellers because of the clerk-tout nexus.
A clerk manning a counter says, “Observe the booking clerk closely when he seeks some information not so relevant to your travel. Just when you recheck the form, he will read an SMS or attend a call and book a ticket in a jiffy. That’s for the agent/tout.”
The other person to watch out for is the ‘non counter’ clerk, who leans over the booking clerk’s shoulder and gets a ticket even as the person in the line is being suggested an alternative train to travel on. There are about six non-counter clerks at any booking office whose only job is to allot counters to the clerks. Instead, they act as mediators between the tout and the booking clerk.
“The non-counter and store clerks receive calls from touts and take the travel details. They then forward the details via SMS or a note to the clerks at the counter, who, in turn, print and put the ticket in the drawer. The non-counter clerk walks away with the ticket,” explained another clerk.
At any time, there are six non-counter clerks at the passenger reservation system (PRS) centre in MMC, who are required to allot the booking clerks their windows. And there are six more clerks who are deputed to distribute stationery.
“The only job they do is engage agents/touts over phone for extra money,” said a clerk, adding that the daily minimum ‘under the counter’ earning of a booking clerk at MMC was '1,000 per day.
Also to watched out for are clerks who discard a smudged ticket or print the same ticket twice. In case of a reserved ticket, it’s mostly the first ticket of the day. The clerk will try to print the ticket without feeding the paper roll into the printer and then repeat the process after doing it. The applicant will collect his ticket and so will the clerk, who will later claim a refund for it. At unreserved ticket counters, the problem is bigger.
“After taking a request from the queue, the clerk will first issue a print command for a Rs 5 platform ticket,” explains a person in the loop. “The traveller will assume it’s his. During the course of the print, the clerk will then hold the printer knob or rub the carbon sheet. The ink will smudge and the clerk will discard the printed ticket and issue a fresh print command. This time it will be the unreserved ticket which he will hand over to the traveller. The clerk has, in fact, printed an unreserved ticket as a ‘non-issue’ (replacement) ticket for the platform ticket, which will be accounted for while the unreserved ticket money goes to the clerk’s pocket.”
The con continues with north Indian migrant workers. When a group of passengers request for 10 adult unreserved tickets, the clerk will book 10 single tickets. “The first four will be adult tickets, followed by a senior citizen, two adults, a child and two more adult tickets,” a former booking clerk explains. The workers understand the clerk’s scheme only when the TTE on board insists on them paying a fine for travelling with an invalid ticket.
