RailEnquiry

CHENNAI: Abhinav Singh, an IT professional, spent more than 12 hours at the Egmore railway reservation counter on Thursday night to book a tatkal ticket to Varanasi. When Singh got to the station at 8pm, he was ready for to wait overnight so he could be the first in line when the counter opened the next morning. But he found that four other people were already preparing to sleep in the corridor near the gate of the reservation centre.

In the morning, however, a railway police constable asked Singh and the four others to move aside and allowed a bunch of touts to stand at the head of the queue before the counter opened at 8am.

Many other passengers who have waited in vain for tatkal tickets complain that touts have, through a combination of bribes to railway police constables and threats and physical intimidation of passengers, taken over reservation counters in the city.

Around 30 boys and young men between 15 and 25 are deployed by touts at the reservation counter in Egmore station every night. They are replaced at 8am by passengers who pay a sum to the tout to keep a position for them in the queue. The touts' boys do not allow anyone to get ahead of them in the queue, even those who arrive at the counters before them. They are trained to shout down or threaten any passenger who dares question them.

By midnight, there are usually at least 50 people sleeping in front of tatkal counters at railway stations in the city. The queue swells to 100 and then 150 between 3am and 5am. At the break of dawn, at least 200 people are waiting for the counters to open. The touts' boys allow passengers who have paid for their position to take their place as security officers look on but do nothing to stop them.

A senior railway official said they had recently tightened the rules to book tatkal tickets. "To prevent the tatkal booking system from being hijacked by touts and unauthorised agents, we have made it mandatory for a photocopy of an identity card to be attached to the reservation requisition slip. Passengers are asked to present the same ID card when they travel," he said.

While some railway officials and constables connive with the touts, but sometimes officers on their rounds identify touts and send them packing. Abhinav Singh said the assistant commercial manager (reservation) arrived at the counters the day the touts tried to take his place in the queue. "During validation of reservation forms and IDs, he identified the touts and asked them to leave the booking counter," Singh said.