Less than 25 days after taking over the country’s oldest railway network, Central Railway’s new general manager Subodh Kumar Jain has already made a ‘connect’ with CR commuters
Less than 25 days after taking over the country’s oldest railway network, Central Railway’s new general manager Subodh Kumar Jain has already made a ‘connect’ with CR commuters and cleared a large number of commuter-specific projects that had been pending for decades.
The east-west connectivity bridges at Kurla, Vikhroli, Kopri at Thane, and Vitava near Kalwa have been cleared at one go. Besides, all the mainline locals have been converted into 12-car trains, making life simpler for commuters who were harassed by the irregular nine- and 12-car services. In fact, the very night Jain was instated, on November 9, a compartment was opened up for women in advanced stages of pregnancy.
“These are small and micro-level things for most of the top officers, who seldom understand the commuting aspect of suburban trains. With the general manager personally taking up these issues, positive changes are being reflected in the public domain,” a railway official said.
“The suburban network is close to my heart, and there should not be any change without consulting me,” he is said to have told his principal heads of departments. Jain, one of the finest brains in the Indian Railways, is a civil engineer from IIT-Roorkie and has been in the forefront of Mumbai’s rail development.
“Even when he was on Western Railway, he was called in to monitor the remodelling of the Masjid Bunder station. He was the one who came up with the idea of lifting the bridges for DC-AC conversion, and is definitely one of the most imaginative minds in the railways,” said one of his old colleagues.
Other big-ticket projects that he is keenly involved in are the running of 15-car trains, a new glass-facade look for Churchgate, the development of an elevated Dadar terminus, and makeovers for Bandra and Borivli stations.
Chief spokesperson Vidyadhar Malegaonkar said, “Random visits to stations, and interaction with passengers at the ground level to understand the real situation, has made him popular with commuters and their problems.”
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