GUWAHATI, March 26 � The Association for Awareness and Motivational Initiative (AAMI), a Guwahati-based NGO, organised a programme for the porters of the Guwahati Railway Station at the Assam Railway Hindi ME School on March 22.
Representatives of the NGO interacted with the porters and the representatives of the railway porters� associations and learnt about various difficulties being faced by the porters.
�As informed by the representatives of porters� associations, there are 500-odd porters, out of which around 365 porters have licence as per earlier records. There is always a sense of conflict among the licensed and non-licensed porters and they tend to regularly pick up verbal conflicts and quarrels during the process of hiring by commuters at the railway station,� AAMI said in a statement.
During the survey conducted by AAMI, it was also seen that the licensed porters were provided with a very small rest room for accommodating 35-40 people and now it is overcrowded with more than double the number of porters it can accommodate.
�The rest room has four toilets which are unused as there is no water supply and the porters have converted them to makeshift storerooms. They mostly use the station toilets which are at some distance from the rest room or the stationed bogie toilets or even defecate in open spaces. As the rest room is cramped up with hardly any space to walk, we could see the porters cooking food on stoves over the same bed (khat) they sleep in,� it said, adding that there was no adequate supply of drinking water near the rest room and that the initial double-storey rest rooms allotted to the porters were later converted to rest rooms for railway police.
A total of 94 licensed railway porters registered and participated in the programme. The participants were briefed on the benefits of yoga and naturopathy by Yogacharya Anil Sharma from the Gauhati Medical College Yoga Therapy Department. Cardiologist from the International Hospital, Dr Debanga Borah addressed the participants on the importance of proper health and hygiene and briefed them about cardiovascular diseases from smoking and alcoholism.
Dr D Borah, along with Dr Swarup Ranjan De from the International Hospital and Dr Mainak Roy from the Silchar Medical College, also consulted and examined the participants. A physiotherapy session was also conducted for the participants by physiotherapist Anil Rawat from the Diganta�s Physiotherapy & Rehabilitation Centre, Guwahati.