Cleaning at the Raichur station was on at a hectic pace on Thursday. What spurred the overdrive was the unenviable position the station earned in the “cleanliness ranking,” based on passenger feedback.
The survey was conducted by the Indian Railways Catering & Tourism Corporation. As many as 1,30,000 passengers participated in the survey that covered 407 major railway stations across the country on 40 parameters.
Raichur’s is the lone station from South India to rank in the bottom 10. Among the nine others in the slot are Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
Interestingly, no station from Karnataka figures in the top 10 “cleanest” stations list.
Officials unhappyWhile Beas in Punjab is billed the cleanest railway station, Madhubani in Bihar is at the bottom of the grid. Railway officials here, however, expressed displeasure over the inclusion of Raichur among the 10 dirtiest stations.
Gopinath Mallya, Divisional Railway Manager, Guntakal Division of South Central Railway, argued that the station was among the cleanest railway stations in the division. B. Jagadish Gupta, a member of the Guntakal Divisional Railway Users’ Consultative Committee, said that the station had issues but they were not related to cleanliness.
“More than cleanliness, there are other issues such as requirement of elevators, drinking water and parking,” he said.
Gujarat has five stations in the list of top 10 cleanest stations in the country — Gandhidham, Jamnagar, Surat, Rajkot and Ankaleshwar. Vasco Da Gama (Goa), Kumbakonam (Tamil Nadu), Nasik Road (Maharashtra), and Salem (Tamil Nadu) are the other railway stations that have been ranked among the top 10 cleanest stations.
Bihar followed by U.P.Five stations of Bihar figure in the list of the 10 dirtiest railway stations in the country — Madhubani, Bhatiyarpur, Anugraha Narayan, Sagauli and Ara. These are followed by four stations — Ballia, Shahagani, Janghai and Pratapghar — in U.P.
