3 Railway Men Sabotaged Gujarat Tracks For Promotions, Extra Day Off: Cops

On Saturday, panic spread among people around the Kim railway station in Gujarat’s Surat when it was found that several critical components had been removed from railway tracks, followed immediately by relief that the sabotage had been caught just before a train was supposed to pass over the affected rail lines.

Coming in the wake of detonators and a gas cylinder being found on tracks in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, central agencies like the National Investigation Agency (NIA) got involved and the trackman who had discovered the sabotage became a local hero.

Just three days on, it has emerged that the trackman and two other railway employees had carried out the sabotage themselves, risking several lives to get social media fame, promotions and a reward, and to ensure the continuance of night duty for trackmen, which gets them an off the next day. The night duty was supposed to be discontinued after the monsoon season and the revelation of the ‘sabotage’, the men had calculated, would keep it going