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The Union Minister of Railways, Shri Lalu Prasad has unveiled eight-point programme for improving rail services to the nation. Addressing a press conference, here today, Shri Prasad said 80,000 vacancies in the safety category would be filled up within the next two years. He said that backlog of vacancies in the reserve categories for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes would be cleared shortly. Besides, a Rail Land Development Authority would be set up to oversee commercial utilization of unutilized surplus railway land and space. The Minister further announced that computerized passenger reservation would be started in all District Headquarters.
Talking of increasing the speed of trains, the Minister announced that 150 kilometer per hour high speed would be introduced on Delhi-Agra section in Bhopal Shatabdi Express Train shortly. He further said that the speed of Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi Rajdhani Express Train would be increased to 130 kilometer per hour from the existing 120 kilometer per hour, early next year. The Minister said that the existing system of manual enquiry at stations would be dispensed with and in its place, an integrated inter-active voice response system introduced to get over the current problems faced by the rail users. The proposed system, to begin with, would be introduced at Bangalore and Patna stations and later extended all over. The new system would be micro-processor based computerized one to be able to answer all queries of the users.
The Railway Minister also announced introduction of Village On Wheels, common man’s Palace On Wheels, which would promote domestic tourism including pilgrimage-based tourism to take the people in all-sleeper class train on Bharat Darshan tour. The Village On Wheels would be launched soon, the Minister averred.
The other measures unfolded by the Railway Minister included, internal recycling of scraps, eradication of corruption in overloading and ballast procurement, intensive checks by General Managers, maintaining train engines in a neat and tidy manner to provide better working environment for loco pilots and rotational transfer of staff on sensitive posts.
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