BENGALURU: Fed up with residents repeatedly flinging bags of garbage from their balconies inside the premises of the diesel loco shed at Krishnarajapuram, top railway officials here recently undertook a novel campaign in their neighbourhood in an attempt to end it.
They went door to door in Devasandra which borders its compound and made one member of each household sign an undertaking that they would refrain from throwing garbage inside the railway premises. They even plan to install CCTV cameras in future to catch those who continue to do so.
A good number of the 600 railway employees voluntarily take on the role of garbage clearance staff inside their campus frequently to ensure it remains clean, said P Murali Krishna, senior divisional mechanical engineer, of the loco shed.
In an effort to permanently end the problem, officials decided to deploy persuasion and invoke the law to convince residents and took a written undertaking from the perpetrators themselves that they will desist from dumping.
“A total of 82 families have signed the campaign we began on April 25 and concluded a fortnight later. We have chosen to visit only those houses bordering our compound as they are the ones who regularly throw their garbage inside the empty spaces of our compound,” said P Sreenivasan, senior section engineer.
Railway officials have been quite professional about the campaign with even the South Western Railway seal in place. Two A4 sheets, one in Kannada and another in English, explain the problem to the residents and the consequences. The subsequent pages have columns for serial number, Name, door number, contact number and signature of individuals!
The letter states, “Please arrange to stop it (garbage) forthwith....despite counselling you have continued to dump the garbage from your side. We are clearing the waste one last time and further if any waste is dumped from your side, the same will be taken up legally under Section 145 9b) of Railway Act. The punishment of first offence is Rs 100 fine, 2nd and subsequent offence Rs 250 and one-month imprisonment.”
Sreenivasan added that it was not possible to reach out to every house. “We have reached out to all houses that immediately surrounding our compound. There is a narrow pedestrian passage through the railway shed’s premises that connects many houses with the main road and many residents of other areas too pass through our campus to access the main road with garbage bags in tow and dump them here and carry on,” he said.
The officials have a plan for that too. “We are considering having CCTV cameras installed near the garbage dumping spots in future,” he added.
Sreenivasan said, “We see a reduction in the garbage dumped on our premises now.”