GUWAHATI: Northeast Frontier Railway's ticket-checking squads caught 76,989 passengers travelling without valid tickets or with irregular ones across its network in July, collecting ₹10.95 crore in fares and penalties in the process.
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Most of that figure, 55,988 people were travelling with no ticket at all, netting ₹8.97 crore in recovered fares and excess charges. The remaining 21,001 had tickets that didn't match their travel, adding another ₹1.98 crore in fines.
A further ₹67.89 lakh came from non-penalty cases, and ₹1.38 lakh from fining passengers over excess luggage. To hit these numbers, NFR ran 313 separate enforcement drives and checked 2,344 trains during the month alone.
Zoomed out, the four months from April to July saw NFR flag 4,14,796 cases of ticketless or irregular travel, pulling in ₹50.57 crore total, a scale that suggests fare evasion remains a persistent, ongoing problem on the network rather than an occasional lapse.
The railway says the checks were carried out by its Commercial Department alongside ticket-checking staff, using surprise inspections and targeted enforcement pushes, and it's continuing to urge passengers to travel with valid tickets and declare excess luggage.