Bangladesh Railway always tries to shrug off allegations of ticket scalping, but the chairman of the parliamentary watchdog on Railways Ministry yesterday said he had his own experience of not getting tickets as a passenger because of touts.
ABM Fazle Karim Chowdhury, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on Railways Ministry, said the smuggling of train tickets by a group of railway officials had become “excessive.”
At the second meeting of the watchdog, he said he had personally investigated the allegations and detected touts buying hundreds of tickets at a time while actual passengers were refused at the counters as there were no more tickets.
The 10-member watchdog suggested introducing a system with the provision of writing the name, mobile number and the national ID number of a passenger on the ticket sold to him.
The railways minister and the director general of the Bangladesh Railway promised to implement the suggestion after examining its operational modalities.
“They [the touts] sell a ticket costing Tk600 for Tk1,000 at Reazuddin Bazar [in Chittagong]. Smuggling of tickets has turned excessive. We have to stop it,” Fazle Karim told the Dhaka Tribune after the meeting.
He said the railway authorities sold tickets 10 days in advance of journeys and this gave touts an opportunity to swindle the system with the help of a section of the staff.
“So, we have also suggested reducing the lead time for tickets to five days,” he said.
He said smugglers would not be able to provide the names and mobile or national ID numbers of so many passengers at a time. The authorities, in case of necessity, can check the authenticity of the passengers’ identity.
“Besides, we have asked the authoritiesto install closed circuit cameras to detect whether the same group of people have been standing in queues to collect tickets,” said Fazle Karim.
Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury, Ali Azghar, Mizanur Rahman, Sirajul Islam Mollah, Mohammad Noman and Yeasin Ali attended the meeting.
Source: UNBConnect