BENGALURU: As Suresh Prabhu was moved out of the Railway Ministery on Sunday, many pointed out the 249 deaths from 207 train derailments during his tenure as justification for the move. Others, who worked with him, however, have come out and heaped praise on the departing minster. Prabhu was just three months shy of completing three years before leaving.
Director of Public Relations, Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Ved Prakash said: “There was tremendous reluctance, initially from the Divisional Railway Managers and General Managers to be be a part of this real-time monitoring system. However, he ensured everyone came on board.”
The first thing that he did every morning was to learn the status of issues raised by the public, Prakash said. “A daily performance report on how each Divisional Railway Manager and General Manager responded to the public was prepared for him by the IT cell. The Minister used to call up the concerned officials once in a while and either pat them on the back or pull them up over the concerns raised,” he added.
“When the new Grievances Cell was set up in August 2015, we used to receive atleast 500 online messages. Looking at the instant redressal, the problems received, messages shot up to 6,000 messages by January 2016. It has now touched 12,000 if you count the Railway Ministry and Railway Minister handles.”
Two all-India numbers to address issues
Prabhu has been credited for the all-India Railways grievance redressal numbers - 139, for general complaints related to rail travel and 182 for security related issues. Prabhu sometimes retweeted positive messages from his huge follower base. Some among the Twitterati lauded him for taking moral responsibility for the twin train accidents in Uttar Pradesh. In fact, the word Suresh Prabhu figured among the top trends in India for a few hours on Sunday. So what will happen now to the steps taken by Prabhu? “The most important thing is that the system has been put in place. So it will continue,” the Director said.
Promised suburban rail
Prabhu reiterated during his numerous visits to Bengaluru that he was committed to implementing the Suburban Rail network for the City. The budgetary allocation for Karnataka too had increased three-fold under him. Deputy General Manager and Chief Public Relations Officer, South Western Railway (SWR), E Vijaya said: “All projects are implemented jointly by the SWR Zone and the State government. The Minister usually has a 5 per cent say in it.” So, work on projects will continue as usual.”
Started Twitter storm
Among his key achievements was galvanising the Railways public grievance redressal system. He requested passengers to tweet to him. The Ministry of Railways and Prabhu were receiving between 10,000 to 12,000 tweets every day. The outgoing Railways minister has a 3.5 million followers on Twitter. Under Prabhu, the exclusive Passenger Grievances Cell was monitored 24x7.