Nagpur, Surat tops the race of Cleanest Railway stations in the country

Nagpur, Surat tops the race of Cleanest Railway stations in the country

New Delhi:  Nagpur station on Central Railway was declared the ‘most clean’ station on CR’s network during a ceremony held at CST on Tuesday as part of 61st Railway Week celebrations.

In a statement, CR authorities said ‘the Best Station for cleanliness was won by Nagpur station of Nagpur Division and Best Kept Garden at Station was won by Lonavala station of Mumbai Division’.

Incidentally, Solapur was the only station of CR in the top 10 list of clean stations as per the Assessment of Cleanliness at Major Stations report submitted by the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC).

Surat is the cleanest railway station in the country, followed by Rajkot and Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh), according to an Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation survey released.

However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency Varanasi’s railway station ranked poorly in terms of cleanliness as it stood at 65, among the 75 A-1 railway stations (those earning revenue more than Rs. 50 crore) surveyed. The survey, conducted based on feedback from around 1.34 lakh passengers, is a part of Modi’s pet project ‘Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan’.

The survey was conducted at 407 railway stations, which included 75 A-1 stations and 332 A-category stations. Around 40 per cent of all the stations surveyed fared average in terms of cleanliness.

Solapur was ranked 4th among the larger A1 category stations with Western Railway’s Surat station coming in first. The only CR station in the A category list in the assessment report was Nashik at number 6. Nagpur was not even among the top 10 on the list.

The report was the outcome of a survey carried out between January 16 and February 5, 2016 by asking 1,34,654 passengers to rate cleanliness at 407 railway stations nationwide. Railways had called this survey the biggest cleanliness assessment ever carried out on the Indian Railways ever.

Railways to privatise cleanliness work at Jalandhar station

With the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) listing the Jalandhar city and cantonment railway stations for poor arrangements in the terms of cleanliness in its recent survey, the Ferozepur division of the railways has planned a complete makeover of the stations for better results in the next survey.

Division railway manager (DRM), Ferozepur division, Anuj Prakash told HT that the cleanliness work of the railway stations would be outsourced in the three-four months. “Though the process has been started, we are facing some technical difficulties,” said Prakash.

Beas was the only railway station in the Ferozepur division that was classified in the A1 category in the survey conducted by IRCTC under ‘Swachh Rail-Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ and Surat was the cleanest railway station in the country.

Admitting that the employees have failed to improve railway stations in terms of cleanliness, officials said that outsourcing is the need of the hour. Officials said they had outsourced the cleanliness work at Jammu railway station in February and Ludhiana and Amritsar in March and the results were positive.

“When we recently visited the Amritsar railway station, we got good feedback from passengers,” said a railway official.

In the survey that was conducted in January and February, 75 A1 stations and 332 category A stations were taken in account across the country. The survey was based on passengers’ feedback. The passengers were asked to rate the cleanliness of the railway station on 40 parameters.

Source:RailNews