Keeping up with its promises for a Swachchh Bharat, Indian Railways on Friday took a decision to provide user-friendly dustbins in all the 60,000 train coaches running presently.
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said that all the 60,000 coaches will be provided with dustbins and the target will be reached as soon as possible. Indian Railways carry over 2.5 crore passengers every day where travelling hour for a passenger in sleeper class coach is about 16 hours.
Barring air-condition (AC) and a few non-AC sleeper coaches, majority of coaches currently don’t have dustbins resulting in problems in disposing garbage by the passengers in moving trains. Currently, both AC and non-AC lHB coaches are being provided with two dustbins at both ends of the bogie. All conventional AC coaches manufactured at Integrated Coach Factory at Chennai are also equipped with dustbins.
Reminding about the promise made in the Railway Budget this year during his address at a conference on ‘rail coach interior’, Prabhu suggested developing a model for revenue generation tapping the opportunities that a contemporary looking coach can generate.
Stating that a lot of progress has been made in making passenger coaches more user-friendly, he laid emphasis on clean toilets, linen, curtains and making the seat, the ladders to climb the berths more user-friendly.
Prabhu said, the emphasis should be on “designing the entire architecture of services catering to all including the poor”. He said the National Institute of Fashion Technology and National Institute of Design are also making progress in design of the coach interiors.
later in the day, Prabhu launched facilities for booking of paperless unreserved tickets as well as platform tickets to cut queues at the reservation counters. launching the IT-enabled passenger services, the Railway Minister said they are in tune with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Digital India’ mission and seeks to help passengers save time by booking tickets right at their home before travelling.
The paperless platform ticket programme would cover the major sections in the Mumbai suburban sections, as well as New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin stations. A currency coin-cum-card-operated automatic ticket-vending machines at various suburban stations on the Central Railway and Western Railway, was also launched on the occasion.