No dustbins at railway stations

The railways are desperately looking for dustbins, lots of them, and fast. Avishek G Dastidar reports.

The railways are desperately looking for dustbins, lots of them, and fast.

HT Image

While doing up the three big stations in the Capital for the expected passenger rush during the Commonwealth Games next month, railway authorities realised that New Delhi, Old Delhi and Nizamuddin — the trio that serves as the face of Indian Railways in the Capital — do not have a single dustbin.

All dustbins had been pinched from the spots and no one knows since when.

Horrified that the Games were just over a month away — and with the Railways being the lead partner of the Organising Committee (OC) after pledging R 100 crore as sponsorship — they quickly did a recce of the stations to figure out where to put dustbins, how many of them and how big.

The result: The three stations need 440 giant, swivelling dustbins made of stainless steel, each with a capacity to hold 120 litres of garbage.

They are bigger than the 90-litre ones the stations earlier had before they vanished or got damaged beyond repair.

The estimated cost of the procurement is R 50 lakh. An average household dustbin is of eight-litre capacity.

But here's the glitch: the procurement process is taking time. So far, officials are busy preparing bureaucratic modalities of the process of procurement.

"We are clear about what we need. These dustbins will be huge and heavy, so that this time they cannot be dislodged and flicked or easily damaged," said Ashwani Lohani, Divisional Railway Manager, Delhi.

"We will install them in time for the Games."