At least 28 people from Tamil Nadu stood on different platforms of the New Delhi railway station every day for eight hours for a month to count the arrival and departure of trains and their coaches, unaware that they were victims of an employment scam.
They had been told that this was part of their training for positions of travel ticket examiners (TTE), traffic assistants and clerks. Each of them paid amounts ranging between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 24 lakh to get jobs in the railways, according to a complaint filed with the Delhi police’s economic offences wing (EOW).
For the one-month training, which took place between June and July, the victims were duped of Rs 2.67 crore by a group of fraudsters, according to the complaint lodged by M. Subbusamy, a 78-year-old ex-serviceman.
Subbusamy had put the victims in touch with the alleged fraudsters. But the ex-serviceman said he was unaware that the entire thing was a scam and he too had fallen for their trap.
In an FIR, he alleged that he met a person named Sivaraman, a resident of Coimbatore, in one of the MP quarters in Delhi. Sivaraman claimed to be closely associated with MPs and ministers and offered to facilitate employment in the railways in lieu of monetary gains.
“Each candidate paid money ranging from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 24 lakh to Subbusamy who further paid these to a person named Vikas Rana. Rana posed as a deputy director in the Northern Railway office in Delhi,” 25-year-old Senthil Kumar, a victim from Madurai, said.
Most of the victims are graduates with backgrounds in engineering and technical education. “Though the training amount varied for positions such as travel ticket examiners, traffic assistants or clerks, everyone underwent the same training, i.e. counting trains at stations,” he added.
Subbusamy told PTI over the phone from his hometown in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhunagar district: “Since my retirement, I have been helping unemployed youths of our locality to find suitable jobs without any monetary interest.”
Subbusamy alleged that Sivaraman asked him to come to Delhi along with the job seekers.
“Initially, I came with three job seekers and when the news of their job training spread in their villages in and around Madurai, 25 more candidates joined in,” Subbusamy said.
According to the FIR, after paying the money as facilitation charges, these prospective candidates were called for a medical examination at the Railway Central Hospital, Connaught Place, and document verification at the office of the junior engineer, Northern Railway, Shankar Market, New Delhi, on various dates.
The victims say that Rana always used to meet them outside for collecting money and never took them inside any railway building.
According to them, all the documents such as orders for training, identity cards, training completion certificates and appointment letters turned out to be forged when cross-verified with the railway authorities.
“After document verification, Vikas Rana and Dubey, one of his associates, took all the candidates to Baroda House for issuing study material and kit and also issued them forged/ fabricated orders for training, which obviously we realised very late, only sometime back, when we attempted to verify its authenticity,” Subbusamy alleged in the FIR.
The EOW in its preliminary investigation found that it was a job scam. Sounding an alarm against such job scams, Yogesh Baweja, additional director-general for media and communications in the ministry of railways, said the Railway Board had been regularly issuing advisories and alerting people against such fraudulent practices.
“Youngsters should be very careful while dealing with such elements and they should always contact the railway officials concerned in such situations so that they get to the bottom of the truth as early as possible and save their hard-earned money,” Baweja said.
