Title - Tout pics dot rly office walls

New Delhi: The next time you visit a railway reservation office in the NCR,do care to look around.Huge posters have been put up with mugshots of 39 people who have been arrested and booked for ticket-touting in the past three years.

Over the last two weeks,Northern Railway has put up 400 such posters in a bid to socially boycott such touts.We wanted people,including their own family members,to boycott them.We also want the passengers to identify them and complain to us;we have provided three numbers for the passengers to call us in case they notice these men getting close to our staff or even queuing up outside the kiosks.Our numbers are 23387349,23002062 and 155210.Passengers can also SMS us at 9717638892, said a senior railway officer.

Two passengers TOI spoke to werent sure if this would have any effect.Im surprised that the railways have done this.Lets see if the vigilance unit also comes out with the names of railway staffers too, said Sudipto Dash,who visited the New Delhi railway station reservation counter on Friday.

Raka Banerjee,who booked her ticket in the Howrah Rajdhani from Noida,said the posters have been put up at nondescript locations making them less visible.

However,railway officials manning the counters said theyve already seen extreme reactions from the touts.We have seen some of them blackening their photographs,scratching or cutting them out in a desperate effort not to be identified at the New Delhi station, said an officer.

The railways effort seems to have been inspired by an older initiative of GB Pant Hospital.Last year,the hospital administration had put up posters with mugshots of men arrested in the past for conning patients in the name of services.