PALAKKAD: The incident of a ticket examiner misbehaving with a lady passenger on board the Rajadhani Express can be attributed to the lack of supervision on the travelling ticket examiners (TTEs), said the general secretary of the Indian Railway Ticketing Organisation (southern region) O S Srikanth.“If there was tight supervision on the ticket examiners, this incident would not have occurred,” he said.With regard to the Rajadhani incident, he pointed out that the ticket examiners in this train are liable only to the squad of the Railway Board.Since it is the Railway Board which has to order any action in trains like the Rajadhani and Durunto, the ticket examiners tend to have a free hand in the entire stretch.Therefore, from New Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram and back in the Rajadhani Express when one batch of ticket examiners board the train, there won’t be any inspections in between.While the guards and the drivers in these trains change at four or five points, the ticket examiners will travel the entire stretch with hardly any inspections. The Railway Board norm states that there should be one ticket examiner for every two coaches at the starting point and one ticket examiner for every three coaches in between for the subsequent laps but this is not adhered to.Under the Palakkad division, there are three depots of ticket examiners at Kannur, Shoranur and Palakkad to man sleeper coaches. Each depot contains around 50 to 60 ticket examiners and 6 to 7 personnel in the squad. There will be one or more inspectors in each depot based on their seniority.However, under the Thiruvananthapuram division, there are depots in Nagercoil, Kochuveli, Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Kottayam, Ernakulam South and Ernakulam North.Thus in Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam there are two depots within a few kilometres. Srinath said that there were demands for setting up a depot at Kozhikode under the Palakkad division but it has not been accepted."On the whole, the Railways does not have a common policy and it varies from division to division. Naturally, when the area is unwieldy the supervision becomes slack. This is well reflected in the Jayageetha incident as well. While the Railways themselves say that a season ticket cannot be issued for superfast trains, how did she manage to acquire one? This only showed that some officials were creating policies ignoring the Railway rules," said Srikanth.An enquiry should have been ordered into the Jaygeetha incident. Around thirty passengers were detrained from another superfast train in Kozhikode on the next day of that incident, he alleged.The Railway Protection Force (RPF) has begun their drive against drunken passengers as it has come to light that most of them harass women passengers and cause nuisance in an inebriated state.“Even if it is nuisance by the railway staff,the RPF could be alerted,” said Palakkad divisional security commissioner George Mathew.
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