Indian Railways: The job-seekers tricked into counting trains

The police in Delhi, the capital of India, are looking into a complaint of an employment scam in which roughly 28 men were forced to count trains for days.

The men thought their training was for a position with the Indian Railways.

The police were made aware of the scam by a former army official who said he unintentionally connected the guys with the alleged con artists.

According to local media, the victims each paid between 200,000 rupees ($2,400) and 2.4 million rupees to obtain the job.

The alleged swindle has been under investigation by the Delhi Police’s economic crimes unit since November, but the information only recently became public.

The guys, who are from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, were required to stand for eight hours each day for approximately a month at several platforms of Delhi’s major railway station. According to the Press Trust of India, they counted the daily trains that went by the station there.

The guys were given the assurance that they would be employed by the railroads, one of India’s greatest employers, as ticket inspectors, traffic aides, or clerks.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the victims informed The Indian Express newspaper that he had been looking for methods to feed his family.

According to Subbuswamy, the former soldier who reported the incident to the police, he had been assisting young men from his homeland in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhunagar district in finding employment “without any monetary incentive” for himself.

He claimed to have met a man named Sivaraman, who professed to know legislators and ministers and offered to find the unemployed men government jobs.

Subbuswamy and the victims were then placed in touch with a different guy, who even subjected the applicants to bogus medical exams. Later, the man stopped returning their calls.

In India, where millions of young people are anxious for steady, secure employment, scams for government jobs are frequently reported. Police in the southern city of Hyderabad announced in March 2021 that they had detained two men who were supposed to have deceived about 100 applicants into believing they were being hired by the railroads.