Kochi: The Southern Railway will strictly enforce the restrictions on travel by unreserved ticket holders in sleeper and higher class coaches of long-haul trains from Sunday. A team comprising senior railway officers and railway police would conduct inspections in each of the coaches at various stations in the division.
“Initially, we’ll concentrate on the Thiruvananthapuram Central-Guwahati Express in which the maximum complaints of unreserved ticket holders travelling in reserved coaches arise. Often up to 300 people are found to be travelling in a single coach, mostly migrant labourers, in the train. The exercise will be a continuous one and cover more trains in later stages,” Mr V.C. Sudheesh, Senior Divisional Commercial Manager, told DC.
The inspection team will be led by the senior DCM himself and will be joined by senior railway police officials among others. As part of the exercise, a Travelling Ticket Examiner will travel in each coach against the usual practice of deploying a TTE for five coaches. The commuters with waiting list tickets, unreserved class tickets and general tickets would be de-boarded and subjected to penal actions.
“The squad will have 20 Government Railway Police personnel. Inspections will be carried out at every station in the division up to Palakkad. The action follows complaints by reserved commuters that they couldn’t even go to toilets. We can’t stop issuing unreserved tickets from ticket counters and hence the action,” another senior officer said.
Announcements of the measure will be aired in languages, including Bengali and Hindi, asking only commuters with reserved tickets to board the coaches. Stickers too in Bengali and English will be pasted inside the coaches. In September last, the railways had decided to stop issuing unreserved higher class tickets through ticket counters that affected nearly 8000 short-distance commuters daily. However, the decision was kept in abeyance following commuter protest.
