Customer
Satisfaction
Sir, we are celebrating the 150th year of Indian Railways as 'Passenger Amenities Year'.
Indian Railways will be completing 150 years of glorious service to the nation this year.
On this occasion, Indian Railways expresses gratitude to its customers whose continued
support has enabled all round development of this vast network.
Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nation, had a close association with Railways. As stated by
Bapu, the customer is the most important visitor on our premises. Hence, it is our primary
duty to ensure the satisfaction of customers and for this reason I dedicate the year
2003-2004 to our customers and declare it as Customer Satisfaction Year.
This year several steps relating to safety, security, punctuality and cleanliness will be
taken so that customers would derive greater satisfaction from the Railways.
Safety
I am aware of the concern expressed both inside and outside Parliament on the vital issue
of safety. In pursuance of the commitment made by me during the Winter Session of
Parliament, a White Paper covering the entire spectrum of the issues involved in safety in
train operations would be presented during the course of this session.
One of the major contributing factors for accidents has been found to be human failure. In
this context, the filling up of vacancies in safety categories in Group 'D' has assumed
importance. It has been decided to fill up more than 20,000 such vacancies through Railway
Recruitment Boards within the next one year.
Training plays an important role in increasing the efficiency of the employees. Railways
are determined to effect continuous improvement in Safety related training and to enable
this, the training facilities at all Zonal Training Centres, seven Supervisory Training
Centres and eight Central Engineering Training Centres are being suitably upgraded.
Modules on Disaster Management are also being prepared. To this end, new works at a cost
of Rs. 41 crores are proposed to be taken up.
Anti-Collision
Device
ACD is an intelligent microprocessor based equipment developed indigenously to prevent
collisions. When installed on locomotives, brake vans and at stations and level crossing
gates, these ACDs network among themselves to prevent accident like conditions involving
collision of trains.
Extended field trials of this device on Jalandhar-Amritsar section of Northern Railway
have been successfully completed on 19th January 2003. Now, deployment of this device on
Indian Railways has started. Provision of ACDs on about 1800 route km section and ACD
survey on 1641 route Km section are in progress.
During 2003-2004, to accelerate the pace of this work, it is proposed to carry out ACD
survey of 10,000 route km. and provide ACD over additional 1750 route km.
|
