Family ‘missing’ during Bengaluru–Delhi train journey reunited after 4 days

BENGALURU: After four days of uncertainty, complainant Sumit Kumar, who had posted about his wife, children and sister going missing on their train journey from Bengaluru to Delhi, has reunited with them.

Sumit, who is around 40 years old and a native of Panipat district in Haryana, Monday claimed on X that he had reunited with wife, Sushma, sister (yet to be identified), and two kids, Anaya and Pradyumn. However, he did not give details of how they went missing and how they were tracked.

The family boarded Karnataka Express at 7.20pm on March 25 (Wednesday) from KSR Bengaluru station.

After Sumit posted about his missing family Sunday, social media was flooded with reposts, reshares and amplification calls. The railway ministry and Railway Protection Force (RPF) were alerted too.

On Sunday night, Sumit uploaded one more post in which he said his family was last spotted in CCTV footage recovered from Karol Bagh Metro station in New Delhi.

When TOI contacted a relative of Sumit, who lives in Delhi, he claimed Sumit had travelled with his family on the train to the national capital. "Actually, such small things happen; he got upset over a minor argument. It wasn't (anything big). His wife doesn't have a phone; there is only one phone in the house," the relative said.

"An argument could have happened on the train itself, and because of that, he must have left quickly from there and got separated from the rest of his family. We started searching at the railway station itself; there was no one at home, it was locked. So, he (Sumit) was worried where they could have gone," the relative added.

According to this relative, the family reunited in their Delhi home much before Sumit uploaded his second post confirming their presence at the Metro station.

Unaware of the events, RPF officers said Sumit wasn't answering their calls and raised doubts due to inconsistency of information they'd received on X.

Shreyans Chinchawade, senior divisional safety commissioner, said: "There has been a lot of confusion in this case. For any distressed situation, calls for help should be raised through official social media handles of police or the agency concerned for better authentication. It will also help in inter-agency coordination. For any issues related to railways, it is encouraged to use 139 helplines."