Railway ticket scalping in Chittagong
Photo: Anurup Kanti Das
The Daily Star (30 March issue) front page news report on train ticket crisis in Chittagong has drawn my attention. To save their skin, the high officials of the railway have transferred the blame for ticket scalping on e-ticketing system. The railway sells only 20 percent of the total tickets on-line (by mobile phone operators). How come the rest 80 percent of the total tickets are sold out within 20 to 30 minutes from the time the sale begins?! The Suborno Express train plies between Dhaka and Chittagong. The train runs with at least twenty carriages. Each carriage contains 62 seats. That means the train runs with 1240 seats. Eighty percent of the total 1240 seats are 982 seats. If selling of each ticket over the counter takes thirty seconds on average, then selling of 982 tickets will take around eight hours. It is not impossible that the black marketers return their unsold tickets with full refund, after the train leaves the station, through ticket selling software manipulation. Whether it is true or not can be found out by collecting last three months' data of refunded tickets. Scalping railway tickets in Dhaka and Chittagong is a million taka a month business. So harsh words, suspension of one or two employees will not work. In any other country, high railway officials would be held responsible for their inability to stop such a large scale ticket scalping.
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