Sindhu, Yashoda, Ravi and about 150 children, all students of a school in this small village of Chegunta mandal were an excited lot on Tuesday.
They got little bundles of goodies in the form of pens, pencils, notebooks, books to paint and stuff like that from General Manager, South Central Railway, P.K. Srivastava.
The level crossing in this village is only a few kilometres away from the then-unmanned level crossing (UMLC) at Masaipet, where a train rammed into a school bus killing 25 students on July 24 last. Post that mishap, the existing programme of closing up UMLCs by having road over and under bridges, posting ‘Rail Mitra’ volunteers and the like was speeded up. In view of the geographical proximity of Wadiaram level crossing to Masaipet Mr. Srivastava stopped there as a part of his inspection along the Secunderabad-Nizamabad section and spoke to locals, with specific focus on children.
Telling them about the ‘Stop, Look, Proceed’ solution to prevent such accidents, he interacted with the little ones and gave away the goodies.
Inviting K. Sanjeev Kumar, the ‘Rail Mitra’ at Wadiaram on board his special train, he gave away a cash award of Rs. 1,000 for his work in motivating the people.
Interestingly, Tuesday’s inspection by the GM was the first where a media contingent from here was taken along, on the GM Special. The first stop was at Bollarum where a festive welcome was accorded to the top official with a loudspeaker belting out songs with trains and railways as the theme by Vinod (also an SCR employee). After finishing his inspection of Bollaram, Mr. Srivastava was so enthusiastic that he picked up the microphone and crooned the evergreen song ‘Gaadi bula rahi hai’ by the unforgettable Kishore Kumar from the film ‘Dost’ starring Dharmendra, ‘Dreamgirl’ Hemamalini and Shatrugan ‘Shotgun’ Sinha.
