City railway station sans metal detector, luggage scanner

STAFF REPORTER

GUWAHATI, July 14: Anyone would literally presume that after the recent gruesome rapes and murders of two women in trains in the state, the Railway authority would step up security measures in all the railway stations across Assam. However, the present security scenario that has been prevailing at Guwahati railway station gives us a polar opposite of our presumption. Forget about stations on outskirts of the city and towns, busiest in entire northeast, the Guwahati railway station is running without a luggage scanner.

Notably, the luggage scanning machine installed at Guwahati railway station has been defunct for the last two years. More surprisingly, six months ago, the scanning machine was lifted from there for repair. However, since then, the machine has not been reinstalled. The irony is that the authority is claiming to be checking thousands of passengers’ luggage manually. Moreover, the Guwahati Railway Station is not even equipped with hand-held metal detectors (HHMD).