Around 100 halt station contractors in Bengal have appealed to the railways for financial assistance, citing severe hardships because of suspension of passenger train services during the lockdown.
Passenger train services have been suspended for over a month because of the nationwide shutdown forced by the novel coronavirus.
In railway parlance, halt stations are small stations where trains stop on the tracks themselves. Such stations only have a platform with boards — on which the name of the station is written — on either side.
The stations are not manned by railways’ personnel. Railway authorities engage a contractor for a specific period to issue railway tickets and to maintain the premises. There are around 1,000 such halt stations across the country, mostly in rural belts.
There are around 150 such stations in Bengal, said a railway official. These stations are run by contractors, “agents” in railway parlance, who operate the stations and survive on commissions from the tickets sold from halt stations.
The rate of the commission goes down with an increase in volume of the ticket sale. The first slab, the contractors get a commission of 15 percent for a sale of up to Rs 15,000. In the last, they get a commission of three percent on a sale of Rs 200,000 and above.
Around 100 such agents have sent WhatsApp messages and e-mails to the divisional commercial manager of the Sealdah division for “financial help” over the past few days.
“We issued a format to all members in Bengal. They are sending e-mails and messages to railways. We are planning to send an official letter. It will be extremely tough for us to sustain ourselves without financial assistance,” said Anup Kumar Dhar, a member of the Indian Railway Halt Station Workers’ Association.
An official in Sealdah division said: “There is very little scope for us to do anything outside the provision of the agreement with the contractors. Most of them have had their dues cleared. If we owe some dues to a contractor, it will definitely be cleared.”