MYSURU ROAD:At Nayandahalli railway station, water is available in abundance but passengers can’t use it.
Taps installed at this station, just 7.5 km from the city railway station, are stolen regularly, and the railway authorities have cut off supply, saying water goes waste otherwise. Platform 1 has six taps, of which only one, near the Station Master’s room, has any water. A steel water cooler here is rusting away without a drop of water. Platforms 2 and 3 have 12 taps but no water flows in them.
A top railway official said, “This is a poor neighbourhood. Taps are stolen at night and the water keeps draining away. This empties all the water stored in the tank for the station.”
As a result, passengers have no water to drink or freshen up. “We have decided to block the water,” he said. With five up and down trains stopping here, nearly 1,000 passengers use the station every day. There are five pairs of passenger trains that stop at Nayandahalli station, which is often used by locals for intra-city commute. All the trains have a one-minute halt here. No Express train stops here.
When City Express visited the station, a man from an adjoining slum was filling his bucket with water from the only functional tap. Another was having a bath.
No protection
The station does not have even a single Railway Protection Force (RPF) or Government Railway Police (GRP) member to protect railway property. The local police do visit the station during their beat but in an emergency, station officials call up other railway stations for support.
The ticket counter is crowded and the staff are overworked. Both reserved and unreserved tickets are booked at a single counter here. Another counter is used only when the computer at the main counter fails, the official said.
Passenger woes
Chetan Kumar, a BA student at the First Grade College in Chamarajpet, feels unsafe at Nayandahalli station. “In the evening, people sit here playing cards under the staircase leading to the foot overbridge,” he said.
The frequent closure of toilets is another sore point with him. According to a railway official, the sanitation contractor locks up the toilets when no trains are in sight. N Mukundan, an MA student of Poorna Prajna Vidyapeeta, commutes from here to Channapatna. “The approach to the station passes through a slum and is in bad shape. I have to ride my two-wheeler carefully to reach the station from Mysuru Road,” he said.