GRP constables travel from Kashmir to Kerala returning 410 stolen cellphones

Pune: Thousands of passengers arrive at the Pune railway station every day. Tricked by thieves operating on crowded trains and platforms, many among them lose their cellphones and the hopes to ever find it.Over the last few years, 410 people lodged complaints about their lost phones with the Government Railway Police (GRP)’s Pune railway police station. The force recovered all the phones — together worth Rs90 lakh — reported as lost. The GRP did not just stop at that, the team ensured that each handset was returned to its rightful owner.Senior inspector Pramod Khopikar of the GRP’s Pune railway police station told TOI: “Most of the complainants were not local residents, but belonged to faraway states — from the snow-covered valleys of J&K to the lush green towns of Kerala, from Assam in the northeast to Gujarat, MP and several other parts of the country.”“Filing a complaint at a railway police station is usually done with little expectation of ever seeing the lost item again. However, we detected the crimes using technical surveillance, IMEI tracking, local intelligence and sustained follow-ups, also nabbing the thieves in the process. The recovered handsets were lying in our muddemal room for the last 10 years. We have started returning them after taking permission from the court,” he said.The GRP teams’ extraordinary efforts began after the recoveries. “Since many complainants lived hundreds of kms away, we decided not to burden them with repeated travel to Pune. Instead, constables reached their doorsteps to return the recovered phones,” Khopikar said.“The constables went by trains and personally delivered the recovered cellphones to the complainants. The constables said many victims could not believe their stolen phones had been found and, above all, the police had come all the way to return it,” he added.Khopikar said the police still have over 1,000 cellphones that were found on platforms of the Pune railway station. “We have initiated the process to trace the owners of these handsets,” he said.