Linen Theft and Responsibility on Indian Railways
Every time you hop on an air-conditioned coach, there’s that neat little linen bedroll waiting for you. Two sheets, a pillow, a cover, maybe a face towel. But honestly, one in every thousand people walks away with at least something. It's a quiet thing, this loss for the Indian Railways, but it piles up.
The numbers are pretty heavy when you look at them. According to stuff reported by The Indian Express , they looked into it from January 2022 right through to May 2026, covering when bedroll services were running again after all that pandemic mess. They found at least 1.27 crore pieces gone. Mostly taken by the passengers themselves, which is just staggering.
And this wasn't a slow creep. The thefts jumped up. We’re talking about a fifty-six percent increase in these kinds of thefts between 2022 and 2025. The Indian Express brought that up. It came from an RTI application, which is how they got the dirt on all sixty-nine divisions of the Railways. They got responses back from 54 divisions across sixteen zones. Not exactly a tidy timeline, right?
When you really look at it against everything the Railways manages every single day, the scale feels almost… trivial. But that doesn't make it any less upsetting. It just screams about how people act. About shared stuff. About responsibility. Or lack thereof.
The cost wasn't small either. The contractors who provide this linen? They were looking at about Rs 104.51 crore lost over those four years, according to the RTI data cited by The Indian Express . That’s a lot of money just vanishing.
Some Railway official acknowledged it. Called it a "serious concern." And yeah, they said they were trying to get action on the people doing this stuff. But what happens next? That part feels fuzzy.
People seem to have specific targets, too. The face towel, that was a clear favorite. Easy to slip into a bag. It ended up at the top of the list for stolen items. Forty-six point five four lakh towels gone in those four years alone. Then you had bedsheets forty-one point three lakh. Pillow covers followed. And blankets. Twelve point nine five lakh blankets.
Pillows, though? Those were surprisingly low on the theft list. Only about two point seven six lakh reported missing over that whole period. Seems like they figured maybe pillows weren't worth the hassle for a thief.
The hotspots varied around the country too. The Bikaner division was one of the worst spots with twenty-five point seven six lakh stolen items. Then Ranchi came up at nine point three one lakh. Delhi followed, eight point two one lakh. Mumbai, Jodhpur, Ahmedabad all ticking up numbers around eight lakh and six lakh gone in those zones.
A spokesperson for the Railways spoke to the outlet about this linen theft. They talked about the headache of passengers taking things. And then they shifted blame a bit. The responsibility for keeping track of the linen actually sits with the agency that was supposed to distribute it. If there’s a shortage, the cost recovery burden falls on that agency.
“Because of the theft,” the official said, “more linen sets are needed to cover the shortfall.” It sounds like a real headache, doesn't it? Just more lost stuff compounding the problem.
Written by Gree News Team — Senior Editorial Board
Gree News Team covers international news and global affairs at Gree News. Our collective of senior editors is dedicated to providing independent, accurate, and responsible journalism for a global audience.
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