Meet only Indian to own a train, it’s not Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Ratan Tata

Once there was a man, a farmer from Punjab, who took the unique journey from seeking damages in court to becoming an unlikely owner of an entire train. His achievement was unparalleled, even the mighty industrialists like Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, or Ratan Tata had not reached this remarkable feat of owning a train.

The tale takes us back to 2007, where the railways had seized some land for the Ludhiana-Chandigarh railway line, land that, as it turns out, included Sampooran Singh’s humble piece of earth in the village of Katana.

Going into the story, Singh found out that the railways had acquired land in a neighboring village at a rate of Rs 71 lakh per acre, which made him feel slighted. So, in 2015, he took legal recourse. He won the legal battle, and the court ruled in his favor, directing the railways to pay him a hefty compensation of Rs 1.47 crore. However, his victory was short-lived as the railways only paid him Rs 42 lakh, leading to a sense of frustration for Singh.

Taking a different approach to the situation, Singh decided to act decisively. District and Sessions Judge Jaspal Verma, in a quite unusual ruling in 2017, decided to confiscate the Delhi-Amritsar Swarn Shatabdi Express train as well as Ludhiana’s station master’s office to recoup the unpaid amount. When Singh received this court directive, he headed to Ludhiana station and single-handedly seized control of the train. For a brief moment in time, Singh became the unofficial custodian of a passenger train.

Consequently, Sampoorn Singh became the only person in India to have ownerhip of a train, which even industrial groups like Ambani, Adani, Tata and Birla could not achieve.