PUNE: The Pune Junction has been ranked 56 for station cleanliness out of 611 stations across the country.
The station has secured fourth position in the non-suburban 1 (NSG 1) category of railway stations for maintaining complete hygiene in the premises.
In the top three rankings are Surat (Western Railway), Dadar (Central Railway) and Secunderabad (South Central Railway). Last year, Pune junction was ranked 25 in overall cleanliness ranking.
On Wednesday, Minister of Railways Piyush Goyal released the ‘Stations’ Cleanliness Survey Report’ (Cleanliness assessment of non-suburban and suburban Stations 2019).
Earlier, the norms for cleanliness were laid down by the Railway Board, which included cleanliness parameters like process development, direct observation, citizen feedback and greenery. Based on these criteria, independent surveys of railway stations were conducted by the Quality Council of India (QCI).
A different type of technology was used to ensure that the information obtained can be verified by matching the images with geo-tagged images. Under this, 720 stations were surveyed, including 611 non-suburban and 109 suburban (SG) stations.
The Railway Board categorised the NSG stations based on the number of passengers travelling to and from the stations and the revenue generated and placed them in four groups -- NSG-1 to NSG-4.
The income group of NSG-1 is Rs 500 crore and the number of passengers travelling is fixed at 2 crore per year. In total, only 21 stations in India are NSG-1 in which Pune station secured the fourth rank.
In this year’s survey report, the ‘Green Railway Station Score’ was a different assessment aimed to find out the increase of green initiatives by the railway stations.
Different scores were set for its various criteria such as a number of plants at stations, waste management of liquid and solid materials, power management and ISO/ Green certification. The Pune station was ranked sixth out of 21 NSG-1 stations.
While best measures were adopted by the railway to focus on cleanliness, the passengers were also made aware to make better use of the facilities provided.
Encouraged by these results, Divisional Railway Manager Milind Deouskar expressed satisfaction over the achievement and also congratulated the employees and passengers of Pune division. He also said that the efforts in cleanliness related work will continue.
