Mumbai
Western Railway’s (WR) initiative to have a WhatsApp number for complaints related to cleanliness has caught the attention of the Railway Board in Delhi. The initiative has been selected along with 10 others across railways divisions to be implemented across the country.
WR’s Mumbai Division has set up a WhatsApp number (9004499773) to get real-time feedback from passengers on the cleanliness at stations and at pay-and-use toilets. The Railway Board handpicked 11 initiatives out of 1,979 entries across various divisions to improve day to day operations in the railways. WR’s DISHA app had also similarly selected in the past.
Passengers need to click a photo of dirty spots and send it to the number and mention the location where the photo was clicked. A dedicated staff member has been deployed across three shifts in their control room to monitor the number. “All complaints are informed to the station master of the said station, who then attends to the complaint,” said a senior railway official. The system was started on July 29 and WR has since received 77 complaints on the platform.
“We get around two to three complaints daily and an equal number of spam messages. When the initiative was first rolled out, we got a lot of spam in the form of good morning messages, but the number of spam messages have reduced over time,” a senior railway officer said.