- I Paid A Bribe
- 13 years ago
- 2622 views
Railway Protection Force - RPF is the most corrupt armed force in *******
This time I unfortunately used ********** as a mode of transport for travelling from Delhi to Mumbai on January 22, 2012, at 8 PM. via Dehradun Express.
I saw two incidents in that journey which reconfirmed my belief that this was indeed one of the most corrupt institutions of India.
In ********** Nizamuddin station at the back gate counter I was asked to open my luggage since they saw in the scanner that there were two bottles of apple wine which I purchased at Shimla. These wines are manufactured by the government of Himachal Pradesh and I had valid bills with me for the same. Despite telling this to the RPF personnel, they paid no heed to my request and asked me to pay out a fine of Rs. 2000. I was not carrying so much cash and I had to board the train hence we settled down for Rs. 500 which was promptly taken without any receipt for the same being given to me despite me asking them to give me a receipt so that I am not harassed again. When it is allowed to carry liquor in airports inside your baggage then I did not understand why it should not be permitted in a train. I am sure it is perfectly okay to carry sealed bottles of wine inside your baggage even in trains.
I would like to recommend the name of RPF for an award for using the technology to its best use. The scanners which are supposed to be used for detecting explosives (unfortunately none have been detected till now) are put to their best use for harassing common people like us. The Indian government has given one more weapon to the RPF by spending crores of taxpayers money to purchase the scanners which is being effectively used to detect liquor bottles.
The second incident happened during the journey when there was a TT change when
the train was somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. One TT got up wearing no uniform whatsoever and with no identity tag attached to his coat along with an armed RPF jawan whose main responsibility was to threaten the individuals who were carrying valid tickets but with seemingly inappropriate identity proofs. I was carrying a credit card as my identity proof and I was lectured that credit cards cannot be valid ID proofs whereas the railways website from where I bought the ticket clearly stated that credit card is a valid ID proof. His attempts of extracting money from me went futile but to my horror I saw him harassing the other passengers who were unfortunately not knowledgeable enough to argue with him even though they were carrying valid tickets which have been checked and acknowledged by the previous TT who boarded at Delhi. This guy accompanied by a RPF jawan created an atmosphere of terror in the compartment for all the passengers who were holding valid reserved tickets whereas nothing was told to the local passengers who got up without reservation and were sitting inside the reserved compartments as they would have already paid some fixed bribe to this TT. At the end of 2 hours of this reign of terror we heard the TT and the RPF personnel discussing near the toilet gate that today’s collection was not up to the mark and they should have been able to collect some more money. Its disgusting to see such incidents happening on a daily basis in Indian trains whereas the inefficient Ministry of Railways is not able to do anything about it.
After seeing these two incidents the only thing I can think about RPF is that their duty is to terrorize people travelling in ********** and extract money. Thank God that the Indian government has not created an airways protection force otherwise the same thing would have been repeated at the airports too.