Nagpur: Rattled by a video showing tea and coffee vendors in trains using water from the toilets on board Hyderabad Charminar Express, the South Central Railway has come out with a clarification.
The Secunderabad Railway Station (SCR) Chief Public Relations Officer, M Umashankar Kumar said; “On basis of the inquiry, stringent action has been taken against the train vending contractor P Sivaprasad, with whom the identified vendor in the video was employed. A penalty of Rs 1 lakh has been levied on the licensee through the IRCTC, the contracting agency. Two other persons seen in the video were unauthorised hawkers.”
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Saturday 23 Nov. 2024
“The Commercial Department of the SCR has been carrying out extensive drives against unauthorised hawking at the Secunderabad Railway Station in the last few months, during which all such hawkers including the two shown in the video have been removed”, clarified Kumar.
The video, which was widely circulated on social media with a tagline ‘Never Drink Tea, Coffee and Soups in Trains, Tea Sellers are using Toilet Water’ shows a man in a blue shirt, seen waiting outside the western toilets, to collect the water filled tea cans and to hand it over to the vendors. A vendor was seen coming out of a train toilet with tea, coffee cans, indicating that water was being mixed in the cans inside the toilet.
The incident had occurred on December 2017, on board the Hyderabad Charminar Express at the Secunderabad Railway Station, reports said.
The passenger who shot the video also questioned him after the man was caught red-handed while filling the tea cans with toilet water. The video was reportedly captured by a passenger while few workers of train vending contractor P. Sivaprasad in the section between Secunderabad and Kazipet tried mixing water in the tea cans.
