NEW DELHI: A consumer disputes redressal commission here has directed the Indian Railway to pay Rs 1 lakh to a senior citizen, who was not given a berth despite having a reservation. The south district consumer disputes redressal commission, Delhi, directed the General Manager of East Central Railway to pay the amount to the complainant, Inder Nath Jha, who was denied a berth during his journey from Darbhanga in Bihar to Delhi in 2008.
A bench comprising commission’s president Monika Srivastava and members Rashmi Bansal and Dr. Rajender Dhar said that people take reservations in advance in the expectation of a comfortable and easy journey, but the complainant, despite taking a reservation a month prior to the date of the journey, had a terrible journey and faced hardship, suffered humiliation, trauma, and anguish.
Jha had acted in a responsible manner right from getting the reservation in the year 2008 till approaching the authorities for doing justice in a lawful manner, it noted. “At the same time, no prudent person would believe that a passenger, more so, a senior citizen would take so much trouble, including fighting a pricey legal battle, for the sake of making a quick buck, as alleged by opposite parties,” the commission said in an order passed on March 16.
According to the complaint, the train officials sold his conformed ticket to someone else. It claimed that the complainant waited for the Travelling Ticket Examiner (TTE) to come and on his arrival, he confronted him about the ticket. The TTE then informed the complainant that his seat in the sleeper class was upgraded to an air-conditioned one, however, when Jha reached there, that berth too was not given to him by the train officials.