It’s rather peculiar,” said a friend recently, “that of late, almost every time that I have tried to buy a train ticket, even if it is a month in advance, I have found myself wait-listed…” She was desperately trying to send off Sushil, her trusted right-hand man to Kolkata for some urgent business, and was unable to get tickets on any train going eastwards. “The air tickets cost upwards of Rs 12,000 — I don’t know what to do!” said she. Just then, her courier service provider, who happened to overhear some of this conversation, said, “Why are you getting so hassled madam? Just send him to the railway station and meet this travel agent friend of mine … he’ll get him on today’s Rajdhani to Kolkata!” But how could he do that when the train was full, she asked bemusedly. “It’s the unofficial Tatkal service,” said he.
“I’m on the train madam,” Sushil called to say a few hours later. “What? How?” my friend spluttered. “Not now,” he whispered like a second-rate gangster, “I’ll tell you everything when I return!” But he didn’t have a return ticket, my friend pointed out. “Relax madam,” said he, “it’s all been taken care of…” When Sushil returned, we were all agog with curiosity. He said that just outside the station, there were a couple of hole-in-the-wall travel agencies, each with long lines of customers outside. They were selling train tickets of all classes — all for double their actual price. Some even had tickets starting from stations other than Delhi! Sushil had no difficulty in securing a confirmed seat for that very afternoon, something that he’d not dreamt could be possible an hour earlier.
“Sushil, what if the ticket had been fraudulent?” I asked. He grinned: “It wasn’t — but it was in the name of Harminder, aged 40. I had to be careful to identify myself that way!” Since the tickets that the touts bought in bulk had to be issued against names — they chose names that weren’t gender-specific, and ages that a majority of passengers could fit into. “You won’t find tickets issued to 70-year-olds with the touts! They prefer ages 30 to 40 — which most people can vaguely pass off as!” said Sushil.
Apparently, holiday time, in both summer and winter, is very lucrative for these agents, as that’s when there’s a heavy rush for places from where people commonly migrate to Delhi — like Bihar, West Bengal and the North East. “If we’d tried for tickets in January or February, we’d have got them the regular way. But during the month of December, it seemed as if the touts had bought scores of tickets on all trains going in these directions,” said Sushil. The much-vaunted E-ticketing facility had, apparently, exacerbated this problem.
Later, I mentioned this story to a friend who’s with Indian Railways. To my surprise, she wasn’t surprised at all. “Did you know, the touts your friend met were all encroaching on Railways’ land!” said she, “every year there are CBI raids on their agencies, and many heads in the Railways roll. But, somehow the touts always get off scot-free!” She said that if people stopped buying tickets from touts, this problem would die a natural death. “Easier said (especially by bureaucrats who’ve never stood in the railway booking serpentine queues) than done,” Harminder alias Sushil retorted, “if one has to travel urgently, and cannot get a confirmed ticket, what’s one to do but turn to the unofficial Tatkal service?”
