Syed Ali Ahmed

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 20

The CBI is likely to file a case soon to unearth a racket involving concealment of overloaded railway wagons with the connivance of officials that may have caused a loss of Rs 4,000 crore to the railways, sources said.

Sources say in 2012-13, railways transported 1,008 million metric tonnes of freight and earned Rs 85,262 crore through it, which constituted 67 per cent of the total revenue for the period.

The sources said the goods were required to be weighed at the originating station or en route or at the destination point to plug the leak of revenue and avoid overloading of wagons.

The CBI received information that the system had been manipulated at several places whereby overloading of wagon was concealed and weight was shown within the permissible limit using sophisticated methodology. The agency also suspected the manipulation had been done through collusion amongst railway officials, private vendors and freight operators.

The CBI carried out a countrywide special drive and launched simultaneous ‘joint surprise checks’ at over 65 locations to check the racket involving major freight traffic points in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Punjab, UP, Jharkhand, Assam, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, MP, Rajasthan, etc, sources said.