GUWAHATI, May 28 - Railway Minister Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu today said that all the northeastern States will be connected with broad gauge rail network by 2020.
He was addressing the public at a ceremony at Dibrugarh Town Railway Station where the Railway Minister inaugurated four new passenger amenities as part of the Indian Railways� thrust on achieving greater customer satisfaction.
The four new amenities launched today are a high-speed free Wi-Fi service for accessing internet at the Guwahati Railway Station, a Reverse Osmosis Water Purifier Plant at the same station, the newly constructed building of the Jorhat Railway Station and the renovated Dibrugarh Town Railway Station.
The Indian Railways is currently undertaking a week-long (May 26-June 1) customer connect programme called �Rail Humsafar�. Today�s event was held as a part of it.
The event was held centrally at the Dibrugarh Town Railway Station and a phone-in event was held simultaneously at the Guwahati Railway Station.
The public meeting at Dibrugarh was attended by Lok Sabha MPs Rameswar Teli and Kamakhya Tasa, MLAs Prasanta Phukan, Rituparna Barua, Terash Goala and Naren Sonowal, besides senior officials from the NF Railway, including its General Manager HK Jaggi, and hundreds of people.
Simultaneously, a public ceremony was held at the Guwahati Railway Station which was attended by Lok Sabha MP Bijoya Chakravarty, MLA Siddhartha Bhattacharya and senior NF Railway officials, including Additional General Manager Ratan Lal and general public.
Prabhu said that Indian Railways has taken several innovative measures in the last two years for improving services, operational efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction and infrastructure development and the result of these steps are becoming apparent now.
The Railways had recently introduced Gatiman Express between Nizamuddin and Agra, which runs at a speed of 160 km per hour, he said, adding that more such trains would be introduced in a phased manner.
Prabhu said the Northeast region is a diverse biological hot-spot and the strength of the region is its rich natural resources. The Indian Railway would utilise this strength for bringing in more development to the region, he said, and elaborated on various plans of the Railways concerning the NE region.
The high-speed free Wi-Fi service for visitors and rail users at the Guwahati station is provided by RailTel in partnership with Google and this state of the art, world-class service is the first of its kind in the Northeast. The service was first launched at the Mumbai Central station in January this year.
The service, built over the fibre network of RailTel, is designed to offer broadband like experience to users.
The Reverse Osmosis Water Treatment Plants at the Guwahati station will provide pure contamination-free drinking water at platforms No. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
The source of drinking water at the Guwahati station is water from the Brahmaputra, which is filtered through rapid gravity filter and disinfected with chlorination.
Three reverse osmosis plants have been installed to remove all types of contamination such as bacteria, viruses, pesticides, heavy metals and chemicals. The water from river is now passed through oxidation chamber, iron removal filter, multi-grade filter and micron filter to the reverse osmosis module.
All the water taps in these platforms are now connected to the reverse osmosis plants. The capacity of each reverse osmosis plant is 2,000 litres per hour which is sufficient for peak hour demands.
The rejected water from the reverse osmosis module is recycled. The plants also start and shut down automatically depending on the water level in the storage tanks, thereby saving electricity.
The Jorhat Town Station has been declared as an Adarsh Station and various works had been undertaken to upgrade the station, while the Dibrugarh Town Station has been thoroughly renovated at an approximate cost of Rs 1.17 crore.
