Indian Railways are set to offer three-year maintenance contracts to manage 50 railway stations, including New Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai Central, Varanasi and Howrah.

The Railway Board has issued guidelines for constituent railway zones to invite tenders to engage professionals to help keep the stations clean.

The contracts will cover key station areas, such as tracks, platforms, buildings, concourses, approach roads, and parking areas, an official release said. The Railways have stipulated the contract should be given to a single agency and there should be no mixed system of management, a move to help fix accountability. The work will also cover rag-picking, disinfection, pest and rodent control, garbage collection, and segregation of waste and disposal.

The Railway Ministry has said that where cleanliness is done through departmental staff, deployment of staff should be rationalised shift-wise and area-wise to ensure that each area is attended to regularly.

The rail employees union is not particularly bothered by this move as cleaning jobs are already being outsourced. “Already 75 per cent of the work is outsourced. Our stance is that the contractors should not exploit people employed in such jobs,” said Shiva Gopal Mishra, General Secretary, All India Railwaymen’s Federation.

The surface of the platform, concourse area, including cladding of the walls should be reviewed, say the guidelines, adding that broken kota/shahabad stones or granites should be replaced to make the surface amenable to easy cleaning.

Steam cleaners should be used to remove stains from all smooth surfaces, such as floors, walls, wash-basins and urinals and bio-enzyme products should be used to kill bad odour in urinals and on the tracks, it said.

Also, pest and rodent control should be an integral part of the contract and CCTVs should be used for monitoring cleanliness activities.

The 50 stations selected are Nasik Road, Solapur, Jalgaon, Howrah, Sealdah, Bhagalpur, Patna, Mughalsarai, Gaya, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Puri, New Delhi, Delhi, Varanasi, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Allahabad, Kanpur, Jhansi, Gorakhpur, Lucknow Jn, Kathgodam, Rangiya, New Bongaigaon, Kishanganj, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Ajmer, Chennai Central, Egmore, Trivandrum Central, Secunderabad, Vijayawada, Tirupati, Kharagpur, Tatanagar, Ranchi, Raipur, Bilaspur, Drug, Hospet, Vasco-Da-Gama, Belgaum, Mumbai Central Main, Bandra Terminus, Vadodara, Bhopal, Jabalpur and Kota.

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