Tatkal booking experience at Byappanahalli BYPL
This morning, my brother and I went to BYPL station for booking a tatkal ticket. We reached there at 9:30 AM, and to our surprise, there was no queue. There was only one working terminal and 2 staff, an elder person aged around 50 and a youngish guy in his late 20's.
Elder guy said that this being a small station with only 1 terminal, they would first give preference to passengers of a train scheduled to arrive there at 10 AM, and Tatkal tickets would be...
more... issued only starting at 10:30. He asked us to go away and come back at that time.
We hung about, checked out the Bangalore metro right next door and returned at 9:59 AM. This time too, there was no one in the queue and there was no train that arrived around that time. However, we soon realized what was going on.
Even though there was no one in the queue, we could still see the ticketing clerk furiously typing . It was then that we noticed a sheaf of booking slips. Obviously, they were booking either for their relatives or friends, or for others through some intermediaries.
As soon as he saw us coming in ,the elder guy rushed out of the booking room, and tried to stall us again by making minor corrections in our booking slip. Thankfully though, this time, he did not ask us to come back at 10:15.All this time we could see the younger guy punching away at the terminal and processing his slips one after the other. The elder guy then went back in, took over and booked our ticket successfully.
Is there anything we can do to report and put an end to this shady practice ? Or is the usual norm at smaller stations ?