Indian Railways’ belated attempt to check the menace of illegal hoarding of tickets by touts, who sold them at premium to desperate passengers, seems to be bearing fruit.

According to a report in the Indian Express, ever since the rule of carrying photo-identity cards during travel came into effect late last year, there has been a drastic drop in the incidents of transferred tickets detected on trains during checks.

Since lesser number of passengers are travelling on transferred tickets, the money the railways collects as penalties from cases of transferred tickets has fallen drastically. It has dropped by over 61% since October last year. The fall in the number of transferred tickets came down by over 32 percent by December-end and further down by the end of February this year.

In October last year, the amount collected was Rs 65 lakh. That figure dropped down to Rs 24 lakh by December-end. Again, the number of cases of transferred tickets detected in October was 10,300, which fell to 7,000 by end of last year.

The decision to make photo-IDs must for all classes was announced in November and implemented from December 1 last year.

The rule of carrying photo identity card by the passengers of sleeper class dealt a body-blow to the touts who, prior to ID rule, used to corner tickets in fictitious names in advance to sell them at a premium later.

Now the chances of a needy passenger's name and other credentials matching those in a pre-booked tickets sold by touts is slim.