How to get out of a sticky situation

Central Railway's RPF officers pose as customers to catch people who stick unauthorised advertisements in coaches

The Railway Protection Force (RPF) officers of Central Railway are a smart bunch. Fed up of the unauthorised advertisement stickers in CR coaches, the officers have decided to catch the advertisers by posing as customers.

Since the drive began a month ago, the RPF has registered 106 cases and detected 30 of them.
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Clean Up: The ads above the luggage rack are illegal.

SMS campaign
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"It wasn't fruitful to just call the numbers printed on the stickers and tell them that an offence had been committed. In most cases, false details had been printed.
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Therefore, we had to be very careful. Our men started posing as customers to carry out enquiries as interested parties and caught the offenders," said J R S Yadav, RPF inspector at Kurla car shed.
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"Once charges were filed, the accused were let off after depositing the bail amount. They were then asked to appear before the court the next day," he added.
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Yadav gave an example of how one accused was caught. "A man called Devendra Wagh had put up an ad saying he could cure any disease.

One of our men contacted him and claimed he was suffering from toothache. He was immediately caught," said Yadav.

Several commuters had complained about the ads to CR via SMS. But, said, Senior Divisional Security Commiss-ioner S C Parhi, "We had initiated action even before the SMSes started coming in.

Several commuters had complaints about the new rakes being defaced."

Complain Here
Central Railway commuters can send their feedback via SMSes to 9004411111.