In just under a year, 186 phones vanish along Karnataka’s rail route | Bengaluru News

Bengaluru: Is your mobile phone safe while travelling on a train? As per data from the Railway Protection Force (RPF), rail passengers lost 186 mobile phones in Karnataka from April 2025 to March 2026 in the South Western Railway (SWR) zone.Though SWR zone has three divisions — Bengaluru, Mysuru, and Hubballi — the numbers reveal that more than half the phones (53%) were stolen within station premises in Bengaluru. Despite such thefts being common, RPF said their reporting was poor in previous years as most of the devices were stolen while a passenger was travelling from one place to another.To tackle this problem, in April last year, RPF integrated the Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR) portal with Rail Madad, and slowly started cracking down on the phone thefts. The portal, launched by the central department of telecommunications, is designed to recover mobile phones by blocking, tracking, and managing lost or stolen devices. By leveraging this platform, RPF renders lost/missing mobile phones unusable by blocking their IMEI numbers, thereby deterring illegal possession and resale of these devices.“It is compulsory to register a complaint with the CEIR portal for it to be investigated. As soon as a complaint is received here, the sim will get blocked,” a senior RPF officer said. Of these cases, 37 were filed in 2026, within 2.5 months of the year, showing a clear trend within the state.Among the 100 phones reported missing within Bengaluru division, KSR Bengaluru takes the lion’s share, followed by other stations such as SMVT Bengaluru, Yeshwantpur, and KR Pura.“The high number of cases in Bengaluru is basically because it has terminals and most of the passengers converge here, generating high passenger traffic. In a few cases, nobody would have stolen the phone, it might just have fallen down. In such cases, it becomes difficult to trace the phone,” Shreyans Chinchawade, RPF Bengaluru’s senior divisional security commissioner, told TOI.What’s different now?He added that it was very difficult to trace and locate mobile phones before the portal, and a recovery would be a rare scenario in the case of theft. “Now, even if the original sim has been discarded, we will get an alert when the new sim is inserted. In most cases, passengers don’t know when the phone is lost, but at least on the CEIR portal, they are giving data like the IMEI number, and it gets blocked, preventing the device’s use for any criminal activity,” he pointed out.As of March 2026, RPF and the Government Railway Police (GRP) have managed to recover 31 mobile phones. While the recovery rate remains low, RPF personnel said that the new portal has actually improved tracking compared to previous years. However, 10 phones out of the 31 recovered are yet to be collected by the complainants. According to officials, some phones remain unclaimed even six months after recovery as the complainants do not answer phone calls.While more than 150 phones stolen or lost from within the state haven’t been recovered, officials said that a significant number of them have already been traced. Once the phone is located, RPF contacts the individual in possession of it. If it isn’t voluntarily handed over, an FIR will be filed.