A very peculiar incident indeed

The third day I was in India I bought a quarterly pass for the Chennai metro railway system. It cost me Rs 295. I put it in my wallet and it hasn't seen the light of day since. Really, I don't know why the government bothers selling tickets to riders. Hardly anyone buys them and I've never seen a ticket checker, until this morning that is. I've now been here for four full weeks and not a single ticket check. Not even on the train traveling down to Pondicherry!

Well, this morning I see a lone woman collecting money in my compartment of the train, and what is my assumption? Of course, I assume she's a beggar, because I've seen that before. This woman, however, did not at all look like a beggar. She was well built and quite tall for a woman (by Indian standards of course) she must have been 5'5". When she turned toward me I saw she was wearing a badge of some sort and the money she was collecting was for train tickets not already bought. I waited and she kept coming toward me checking everyone's pass one by one. She gets to my corner of the train and checks all the men around me and ignores me. I thought I was completely home free. She turned around and checked some travelers just getting on the train.

At this point I was simply holding my train pass, because I'm trained to follow rules when it comes to transportation (the biggest reason I won't drive here). I got mildly worried, because the identification I'm required to hold with this ticket is my passport. I don't carry my passport on my person very often. I leave it locked up at my apartment. But the woman had passed me by. Just as she turned away from me I put my ticket away and THEN she turned to check my ticket, go figure...

So I showed my ticket (without proper ID) and she checked the date, said nothing to me and went on checking others' tickets.

A single main question comes to mind (being the mathematician of sorts that I am):
If I never bought a ticket and took the risk of riding "naked" as it were would I save any money? The answer is, at 5 Rs. per ride and 295 Rs for a quarter of train rides, it doesn't matter at all. The trains are so heavily subsidized that the money spent by the riders is nothing more than a drop in the bucket.