Bengaluru Railway Division comes under PM GatiShakti plan

BENGALURU : Railway projects in Bengaluru city can look forward to a speedy completion and smooth coordination, thanks to the Bengaluru Railway Division being brought under the Prime Minister’s GatiShakti Master Plan, launched nearly six months ago. Only four of the 67 railway divisions in the country have been selected in the first phase. 

A meeting of the Railway Board in New Delhi finalised the move with Delhi, Khurda and Bilaspur being the other divisions selected. An order in this regard was issued on Monday. “The unit in Bengaluru will be constituted shortly. The objective is to give an impetus to speedy completion of infrastructure and other projects with smooth co-ordination across various departments within Railways as well as that of the state governments,” Chief Public Relations Officer, South Western Railway, Aneesh Hegde, said. 

The step empowers the Bengaluru Divisional Railway Manager as the responsibility for completion of projects comes under his  purview. “Every project will have a project manager who reports on the progress of the work to the DRM,” Hegde said. The policy aims at empowering decision making at the divisional level.At present, the constructions division in Bengaluru carries out major projects related to the division but it does not come under the division’s purview and reports to the South Western Railway Zone directly. 

A Gatishakti Digital Dashboard has been created. It would have details on every project with fresh updates fed into it by every department concerned with the project: the Centre, State, Water Supply, Forest, National Highways and so on.

“The PMO, Railway Ministry, General Manager of each Zone as well as Divisional Railway Managers will have access to the portal and constant monitoring will be done,” the CPRO said. Each Ministry will be given separate user identification (login ids) to update their data on a periodic basis, he explained. “The intervention of head office used to be high earlier but now it has been delegated at the divisional level,” Hegde said.