Vigilance Raid at Cantt Unreserved Counters Finds ₹2,100 Excess Cash

A vigilance team checked unreserved ticket counters in the passenger shelter hall at Varanasi Junction (Cantt) around 8 am on Thursday, 17 September 2026, and found ₹2,100 excess cash against the record at Counter No. 1, held by a night-duty booking clerk. The clerk could not give a satisfactory explanation, and a report was prepared. Counter No. 2 showed only ₹40 excess. In the stock room, officers noted irregularities in ticket records and account books and seized those records.

The clerk’s name has not been published in available reports and is left unnamed here. Sources said the check followed passenger complaints of overcharging at unreserved windows. The vigilance report is headed for Northern Railway headquarters for departmental proceedings. Excess cash against a counter record is an administrative integrity finding, not a criminal conviction, and this desk frames it that way.

The same Thursday, under Senior Divisional Commercial Manager Samarth Gupta, a ticket-check drive ran from 8 am to 4 pm under Station Director Arpit Gupta. Teams booked 89 ticketless travellers and realised ₹82,970 in revenue. Seventeen commercial staff took part, including CTIs Janardan Singh, S.K. Pandey, B.B. Singh and Sanjay Kumar Singh, with RPF Sub-Inspector Madhuri Yadav on security.

Cantt’s unreserved counters handle heavy morning queues for short and medium-distance travel. A night-duty clerk carrying excess against the book, followed by a daytime ticket drive that recovers fare from ticketless passengers, sits as one day’s dual stamp: vigilance on the counter side, commercial enforcement on the platform side. Neither step needs opposition politics to be understood. Both sit inside ordinary railway revenue and integrity work.

Northern Railway departmental action will decide what follows for the Counter No. 1 clerk. Stock-room books seized on Thursday will form part of that file. Readers should not assume the ₹2,100 figure equals a charge sheet; it equals excess found versus record at the time of check. The ₹40 at Counter No. 2 is recorded for completeness and does not drive the same gravity in the published account.

Passenger complaints of overcharging are what pulled vigilance to the shelter-hall windows, according to sources familiar with the check. Unreserved tickets are cash-heavy and queue-heavy; small overages can hide in rush unless a surprise count is done against the book. That is the operational reason a morning raid at Counter No. 1 matters to travellers who buy tickets before dawn.

Stock-room irregularities matter because unreserved ticket stock and account books are how a counter’s daily sales are reconciled. Seizing those books freezes the paper trail for Northern Railway HQ even before any clerk statement is finalised. The same-day commercial drive under Samarth Gupta and Arpit Gupta shows the division was already running a revenue sweep when vigilance walked Counter No. 1; the two tracks reinforce each other without needing a political frame.

For passengers at Cantt, the practical line is that vigilance walked the counters on a Thursday morning and commercial staff walked the coaches the same day. For the division, the stamp is a vigilance report to HQ, seized stock-room records, and ₹82,970 recovered from 89 ticketless travellers before the afternoon closed.