Partnering with Indian Railways
Indian Railways (IR), the largest transportation system in the world under a single management and one of the busiest rail networks in the universe, has speeded up its efforts to create clean stations, clean trains and clean train journeys in association with ManMachine India (MMI).
The IR is having 300000 wagons, 75000 passenger coaches, 9000 locomotives and transporting over six billion passengers and 600 millions tonnes of freight annually traversing across the country on a 65000 mile track. Naturally, maintaining cleanliness is really a gargantuan task. But the IR has taken this challenge very seriously over the last 10 years.
During the last CTRAM meeting, attended by the Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, the issue of comfort and safety to passengers was accorded the highest priority. In different other departmental meetings held across the country, this issue figured regularly. The IR decided that strategies must be formulated and implanted for cleanliness. Attending such meetings, the MMI expressed its readiness to carry out mechanized cleaning in the railways. The IR has already accepted those recommendations of the MMI.
As the IR is a combination of railway stations, coaching depots, schools, workshops and hospitals, the success of carrying out cleanliness operations hinges on the combined efforts of all these departments. MMI, providing the technical support to the IR, has suggested that there are many areas where the cleanliness drive has to be addressed individually, as a common cleaning method cannot work there.
MMI has deployed ride-on-scrubber driers BR 90/140 for effective cleaning of large junctions like Chennai Central station in the South and Pune & Katni junctions in the West. This machine can wet scrub and dry an area of 6000 sq. mt in an hour with just a single operator and using minimum quantities of water and cleaning agents. Similarly, the cleanliness operation in various railway junctions in the North and East will be carried out by Karcher machines working round the clock.
MMI has supplied over 2000 machines to the IR at its stations, hospitals, depots, diesel sheds and workshops. These machines and equipment include, vacuum cleaners, walk behind indoor sweepers, walk behind scrubber driers, industrial vacuums, ride-on-scrubber driers, ride-on-sweepers, hot and cold high pressure cleaners, high pressure foam sprayers, hand scrubbers, single disc scrubbers, steam cleaners and high pressure cleaning systems. The company has also pressed into service the sophisticated ice blasting technology with the help of which, cleaning on a higher scale is possible without generating secondary wastes. Trained service engineers conduct regular on-site training programs for the staf
Sunil Kapoor, DGM, ManMachine India
