New Delhi Railway Station stampede: 2,600 extra tickets were sold in 2 hours, says report

The Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) showed that 2,600 extra tickets were booked on Saturday between 6 pm and 8 pm, the same day the deadly stampede occurred at New Delhi Railway Station. The stampede took place around 10 pm when a surge of passengers, disoriented by conflicting train announcements, hurried towards platform 16 via a narrow staircase. This resulted in 18 deaths and more than a dozen injuries.

On average, around 7,000 tickets are booked at New Delhi Railway Station between 6 pm and 8 pm each day. However, on the day of the incident, over 9,600 general-class tickets were sold during this period.

The report further mentioned that over 54,000 general class tickets were booked via UTS on Saturday. “While there is no doubt that there were a huge number of people on the platform on February 15, it is still less than the total UTS tickets booked on 8 February and 29 January. On both of these days, 54,660 and 58,000 general class tickets were booked respectively. The crowd could have been managed,” a senior official from the ministry of railways