The Railway Protection Force (RPF) of Konkan Railway, along with scores of track patrolmen, conducted one of the biggest searches for a missing passenger after a co-passenger tweeted the former's disappearance on railway minister Suresh Prabhu's twitter handle.
RPF personnel spread out at stations and boarded trains all the way from Mumbai to Karnataka, and teams scoured close-circuit television cameras. In order to make sure the man might not have fallen off the train onto the tracks, gangmen were ordered to search on the sides of the tracks for several kilometres. When the missing man was finally found, it turned out that he had stepped out of his train to look for gutkha and missed the train as he had wandered away from the station. According to RPF officials, the drama started in the early hours of Monday when SK Bhagat, Director-General of RPF, alerted KR chief security commissioner AN Sinha about the issue. Bhagat in turn had been told about the case by Prabhu. Sinha alerted Central Railway RPF chief AK Srivastav as well as the engineering and operations teams of KR.
"Passenger Teja Naik, 40, was part of a team of 99 people who were travelling from Mumbai on the 12133 Mangalore Express towards Udupi in Karnataka. The group couldn't find him in the train since 11:30pm on Sunday. Someone from the group tweeted to the minister. By the time the RPF unit of KR got the message to look for Naik, the train had reached Bhatkal in Karnataka on Monday morning. A team of the RPF met the group inside the train there and got details about Naik including his photograph," said a railway official.
Armed with the details of Naik, the RPF asked local police stations, as well as hospitals, to check if any person matching Naik's description had been found or brought in as an accident case. CCTVs of all stations the Mangalore Express passed through from Mumbai to Udupi in Karnataka were also checked. Trains that left immediately after Mangalore Express were also checked, said an official, just in case Naik boarded them after missing his original train.
" RPF officers of Roha station on Central Railway while checking footage from 12:48am to 12:54am- when the train halted at Roha- and a 20-minute stretch after the train left the station managed to spot someone matching Naik. Since it was now confirmed that he had got down at Roha, a team started looking for Naik in the areas around the station," said the official.
Naik was found at 5:30pm on Monday near Roha. Naik had come to attend the Vishwa Konkan Lok Kala Utsav held at Mahim, Mumbai on March 18-19. He told the RPF that he was loitering around the station unable to find his way back as he only knew Kannada and was having trouble communicating his plight to people he was asking for help.
"After all this usage of manpower coordinated all the way from the RPF headquarters in New Delhi to Mumbai to Goa to Karnataka to trace a person, what we find out is that he had stepped out of the train to buy gutkha, something that is banned in Maharashtra," said a railway official, clearly disgusted at the man-hours spent.
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