That pile was generated from one train. What of the rest of the station and then the rest of the city?
Wake up call for Chennai
That pile was generated from one train. What of the rest of the station and then the rest of the city?
Yes, I noticed this as well last week at Central. Well, “noticed” is perhaps a wrong word – you are literally FORCED to look at the gargantuan piles of garbage. This is simply another corollary to all the cups and the plates that get regularly and routinely thrown out of the windows and doors of our trains. Who is going to clean them up? For instance, the Krishna river at Vijayawada shows a horrendous picture of rubbish thrown out from trains and this depressing picture is alarmingly true for ALL our rivers…
What is the remedy? Is anyone listening?? Is there something we can do at all???
Also, the cleanliness standards of the Delhi Metro has demonstrated that its not impossible to achieve clean and neat public surroundings. I agree that stations like Central have long distance passengers, and quite often transit passengers have nowhere to go in between trains and hence they just make do with squatting on the platforms, making themselves “at home” – with the consequence that the garbage that they generate naturally gets discarded anywhere but the bins. So this just requires a different perspective but it CAN be done I’m sure. Mr. Sreedharan of the Delhi Metro when questioned on the secret of the Delhi Metro’s cleanliness success is said to have responded, “if you give people clean surroundings to start with, they WILL maintain it…” So that provides the much needed hope for our public places especially railway stations.
On another note, I’m compelled to point out another thing. At Chennai Central when I was on the way to board my coach to Rajamundry on the Chennai-Howrah Mail last Thursday, I was literally forced into seeing the abysmal state of the unreserved travellers – who just were packed into the respective coaches including the doorsteps well before the scheduled time. The coaches had no lights or fans switched on at that time (it was about an hour before the scheduled departure at 23:40 hours) so the unreserved coaches were in total darkness, packed with people naturally beyond capacity with people spilling on to the doorways. The stench of sweat and the heat emanating from the coach combined with all the other auxiliary smells that Central is famous for, was positively nauseating. There seemed to be a quiet air of resigned acceptance amongst the people. I quickly hurried on to my coach with the very cynical thought that perhaps the train to Auschwitz couldn’t have been much different…