Additional booking counters, trains to cater to holiday rush

SWR's Mysore Division to go paperless soon; old files dispatched

In the run up to the Dasara festivities 2014, South Western Railway, Mysore Division has put in place an action plan to deal with the extra crowd anticipated in the holiday season.

Rajkumar Lal, Divisional Railway Manager, South Western Railway, Mysore Division, stated that additional counters for issuance of ‘unreserved’, as well as ‘reserved’ tickets will be opened at Mysore in the peak holiday season to reduce waiting time in queue.

Chamarajapuram, Nanjangud Town, Krishnarajanagar and Chamarajanagar stations will also be provided with extra booking counters for hassle-free dispensation of tickets.

Also, to cater to Dasara rush on Vijayadashami day on October 4, SWR, Mysore will be running one special train in each of Mysore-Bangalore route and Mysore-Chamarajanagar route. Lal said apart from the special trains, 15 trains will be fitted with additional racks as part of extended measures.

Massive ticket checking drives will be launched across Mysore Division to curb the menace of ticketless travel, he added. Lal informed that additional security personnel will be deployed during the period, besides effecting increased surveillance and luggage screening of passengers. Sniffer dogs will be extensively used in all passenger-carrying trains, as a precautionary measure to thwart any mischief by anti-social elements to create unrest, he added. Augmentation of composition of trains, based on demand, has also been planned in the holiday season.

Bi-weekly
Lal announced that the prestigious bi-weekly premium special between Mysore and Varanasi will be commencing from September 19. Initially, these trains will make a dozen trips in each direction, following which, regular services will begin, he said. He also stated that the services the new trains announced in the Railway budget 2014-15 -- Bangalore-Mangalore daily express via Mysore, Bangalore-Shimoga bi-weekly express and Yeshwantpur-Chikmagalur Passenger will be commissioned shortly.

Paperless
Lal said that Mysore division of South Western Railway was in the forefront of implementing the new government directive for improving the work culture and environment at work place to cut red tape and bring about efficiency in working by harnessing the latest technology available. He said that Mysore Division would soon be a ‘Digital Division’ with significant reduction in paper work. The size of daily reports relating to freight loading, traffic earnings, detentions to trains, incidences of signal failures and other special occurrences complied, has been reduced from 50 pages to just four, and this will be presented only in digital format.
Lal also stated that even at stations the in-charge managers now have to maintain fewer registers than what it used to be earlier. For example now the Station Manager in a station like Mysore needs to just have 28 registers instead of nearly 70 registers consequent on declaring certain archaic rules/procedures redundant. Repealing of more such century old rules was in the offing.

Messaging App
Henceforth, all officers of Mysore Division will be on WhatsApp and will be receiving reports directly from DRM which greatly reduces taking out multiple copies, he added.
“There will be greater coordination between different departments as information in digitised formats leads to quicker action and better efficiency by doing away with mundane paper work over and over again,” he said. Several software are being developed to completely eliminate paper work relating to field inspections by different wings of the Division, which is expected to further enhance the efficiency at all levels. “Now deadlines are reflected for initiating corrective action wherever deficiencies are reported so that the monitoring of accountability at various levels is possible,” he said.

Dispatch of files
Mysore Division, in keeping with the directives of the ministry of Railways, has since dispatched nearly twenty truck loads of old files in the first phase having no reference value, and an eyesore in an important public office. “This initiative besides creating more space had contributed to better ambience in offices leading to higher productivity,” he added.

Cleanliness drive
Lal reiterated the commitment of the Railways to strongly push for a very clean environment at stations, on trains and even railway colonies across the Division. He stated that a special cleanliness drive is being launched on October 2 at all stations and colonies of Mysore Division to mark the birth anniversary of the father of the nation. “Field inspections by officers/supervisors at various levels are in progress and the momentum will be sustained,” he added.