OREANDA-NEWS. With a view to curbing the ticketless travel, a series of fortress checks were organized by various Zonal Railways during this month of September 2013. During the last month, such checks were carried at thirteen major stations including Lucknow, Patna, Bhopal, Nagpur, Vijayawada, Chennai, Howrah, Delhi and Pune. At some of the major stations around 500 to 1000 ticketless travelers were apprehended during each check. It is proposed to continue such fortress checks during the coming months.

Under this kind of fortress checks, a large number of ticket checking personnel (exceeding 100) are deployed at major stations along with a substantial strength of security personnel from the Railway Protection Force (RPF). Senior Commercial Officers from the Zonal Headquarters, Divisional Railway Managers/Additional Divisional Railway Managers and other Senior Divisional Officers actively monitor such fortress checks to detect persons traveling without tickets.

Conducting ticket-checking drives is among the significant activities on India Railways to curb leakage of revenue from passenger business. Zonal Railways have also been instructed to strengthen ticket checking activities and check the tickets of passengers by deploying uninformed ticket checking personnel at the gates.