MEERUT:
A 73-year-old man who was forcibly evicted from a train because his ticket was wrongly dated 1,000 years in the future was on Tuesday awarded compensation by a consumer court in Saharanpur.
Vishnu Kant Shukla, a retired professor, had boarded Himgiri Express for a journey from Saharanpur to Jaunpur on November 19, 2013. The train ticket examiner (TTE) however, found that Shukla’s ticket was dated for 3013, and got Shukla sent out of the train at Moradabad.
Shukla said, “I retired as head of the Hindi department from JV Jain Degree College in Saharanpur. In short, I am not a person who would travel by train with a fake ticket and here was a TTE who humiliated me in front of everyone, demanded that I pay a penalty of Rs 800, and even got me evicted from the train. It was an important journey as I had to visit my friend whose wife had expired.”
Returning home to Saharanpur, Shukla filed a case against the Railways in the consumer court. The case went on for five long years.
“Shukla is my neighbour and when I heard about his predicament, we sat together and decided to file a case. A lot of things happened during the proceedings. The Railways lawyer did everything to prove that our claim was wrong. Railways officials even said that the ticket was not purchased from the booking counter and when court asked them to produce the booking form, they said they did not have it,” said Surender Dixit, Shukla’s lawyer.
On Tuesday, the court decided in favour of Shukla and slapped a penalty of Rs 10,000 on the Railways for causing mental harassment to the professor and an additional Rs 3,000 as compensation.
