The multi-crore food stall business of the railways, the Central Railway in particular, has come under the scanner after a special CBI court recently asked the Mumbai unit of the Central Bureau of Investigation to look into the case of 12 stalls which continued to function on CR long after their licences had expired. The amount of unpaid dues of these 12 stalls has touched Rs1 crore.
Of the stalls, 10 are owned by a leading coffee brand, while two are of a biscuit manufacturer. The matter came to light after a CR employee — Ajay Bose, a parcel clerk at Lokmanya Tilak Terminus — put in a Right to Information query in January 2012, asking for details of the stalls run by the two firms at CST and Dadar. The reply was a shocker, Bose told dna.
Ten stalls of the coffee chain had got permission between December 2006 and May 2007, while the licences expired exactly three years from then, the first expiry coming in December 2009 and while the last in May 2010. The two stalls of the biscuit manufacturer got permission in October 2007 and expired in October 2010.
However, all the coffee stalls continued to do business right up to January 2012 and the two biscuit stalls, till April 2012. While the yearly licence fees of the coffee chain stalls ranged from Rs1,87,500 to Rs5,22,000, the biscuit firm’s stalls had a licence fee of Rs2,67,262.
In its order, the Special CBI judge for CBI-Greater Mumbai ordered the CBI’s Anti-Corruption Bureau, Mumbai to carry out an investigation and submit a report to the CBI court.
The complaint
The RTI application formed the crux of CR employee Ajay Bose’s complaint to the CBI and the CR’s vigilance department. In his complaint, Bose named seven officials of the commercial department of CR’s Mumbai division in his complaint, stating that without their complicity, it wouldn’t have been possible for the stalls to flout norms.
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