Title - Safety and cleanliness high on Railway board chairman's agenda -

KOLKATA: The railways will have to take steps to improve catering services and the level of cleanliness on moving trains, railway board chairman Vinay Mittal told officials during a series of meetings in Kolkata between Friday and Saturday. On Friday, Mittal held meetings with A K Verma and P B Murty, the general managers of South Eastern Railway (SER) and Metro Railway respectively. On Saturday, he met G C Agarwal, the general manager of Eastern Railway.The chairman told officials that more attention needs to be paid to cleanliness and catering. Even SER, which is primarily a freight-carrying railway, will have to pay more attention to passenger amenities. Clean linen must be supplied to passengers will also have to be clean.These directions come at a time when passengers have lodged several complaints against the detoriorating quality of services on running trains. For some time now, no pantry car is being attached to the Howrah Jammu-Tawi Himgiri Express, resulting in problems for passengers."The chairman also insisted that security on moving trains needs to be increased. All unmanned level crossings will have to be eliminated within five years, he instructed. Loss of life due to accidents at unmanned level crossings in the last few years has been a cause of concern for the railways.Vinay Mittal also told us that apart from taking all out measures need to be taken to improving track quality and the condition of coaches and locomotives, Mittal also said that there is need to introduce refresher courses for running staff to train them in better passenger services," an official said.

Mittal and Agarwal also visited the Howrah station on Saturday and inspected the passenger amenities and security systems. Officials may not have brought to his notice that the X-Ray baggage scanner at the Howrah station old complex has been out of order since March 10.

The ongoing projects in the state were also discussed in the last two days. These included the DMU coach factory at Haldia, the wagon factory in Jellingham, coach midlife rehabilitation workshop at Anara and the centre for excellence in wagon prototyping at Kharagpur.

It was also pointed out to Mittal that SER has embarked on the recruitment of 5,800 Group-D employees for which 6.60 lakh applications have been received.

The need for a new terminal at Santragachhi came up for discussion. Though the project has been approved, a mere Rs 2.03 crore pittance has been allocated in the last couple of years To develop Santragachi, a coaching maintenance facility also needs to be developed at Padmapukur. In the last couple of years only about Rs 2.03 crore has been allocated for this Rs 31.50 crore project.