Delhi Metro, often referred to as the city’s lifeline, has become a hotspot for “reelers” and “Instagrammers” using the trains as backdrops for their social media content. This trend has not only caused discomfort among fellow passengers but has also led to a significant increase in prosecutions for creating nuisances.
Between April and June, over 1,600 commuters were booked for making reels and other disruptive activities on metro premises, marking a three per cent rise from the same period last year.
Be it two girls indulging in obscene activities in the metro of making videos while putting colours on eah other or a girl dancing to a Bollywood song and shooting it with people visibly uncomfortable around, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has taken a strict approach to curb such nuisance from happening in the metros.
According to the data, 1,647 penalties were issued for creating nuisance in three months under Section 59 of the Metro Railways (Operations and Maintenance) Act. The corresponding number for the same period last year was 1,600.
A senior DMRC official on Thursday said creating nuisance may also include offences such as sitting on the floor of the train and eating inside the train, among others.
The DMRC issued 610, 518 and 519 penalties in April, May and June, respectively while the corresponding numbers for the previous year were 528, 485 and 587, the data showed.
DMRC Managing Director Vikas Kumar said they penalised people for creating nuisance in the metro area. “We use our machinery so that such kind of incidents should not happen on the metro premises.
We have a provision of penalising if someone creates nuisance on the metro premises and we do penalise them. It is an ongoing process and the more you keep doing it, the more people will get discouraged,” he said.
“But the issue is that we do not have enough manpower to check every corner. If we have 67 lakh passengers a day, then monitoring such a huge number of people is not easy. We have CCTV surveillance through which we get to know if anything happened on the premises,” he added.
The DMRC has also put up posters at several metro stations, dissuading passengers from making reels and causing discomfort. In April, the DMRC asked the Delhi Police to conduct a thorough investigation after a video emerged online of two women applying colours on each other inside a train. The video, which surfaced ahead of Holi, drew criticism from a large section of commuters.
The DMRC had said at the time that it was running various campaigns, both online and offline, to discourage passengers from indulging in any activity that might cause inconvenience to fellow commuters. Mobile checking squads are also deployed at times to check activities considered inappropriate.
