The Digital India initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have few takers among the Indian Railways’ top brass as six of the 16 Zonal General Managers (GMs) have failed to stay connected with rail users on Twitter handle. Among those who have fared miserably on the micro-blogging site is Delhi-based Northern Railway General Manager AK Puthia, who heads one of the busiest zones of the Railways. Further to the disappointment of the Railway Ministry, while all other Zonal headquarters have been equipped with biometric attendance system, made mandatory by the Central Government, the Northern Railway GM’s office at Baroda House has yet to install the system.
According to Puthia’s Twitter handle details, he has just 28 tweets in his account in about 30 days. As per the details collected by The Pioneer from the Twitter handles of all the GMs, the East Central GM tops the list with over 200 tweets and 1,223 followers, while his Eastern counterpart has 122 tweets to his credit. The GMs of South Central, North Eastern and Northeast Frontier have achieved zero in terms of tweets.
last month, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu had directed all the GMs and Divisional Railway Managers (DRMs) to create their own official Twitter handles in order to reach out to passengers with real-time solutions as part of concerted efforts to engage passengers on social media in a big way. As far Indian Railways is concerned, it has a handsome following of 4.51 lakh on Twitter and more than 3.8 lakh on its Facebook page with an average of seven tweets per day.
The Minister’s idea is to connect with the public to collect passenger feedback and address grievances in a very transparent manner through Twitter. “The Prime Minister’s vision of Digital India is also our guiding force in Indian Railways. The IT initiatives being undertaken by Indian Railways are in line with the Digital India programme. The spirit of this programme is to work as a broad umbrella for various initiatives undertaken to improve quality of life and create facilities for common people,” Prabhu had said early this month while launching some of the IT systems.
It was on the directions of the Prime Minister that the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) early this year asked all Secretaries, including Railways, to issue directions to install biometric attendance system portal in all its offices across the country.