BENGALURU: Soon, you can test your fitness when you drop and pick your family and friends at the Krantivira Sangolli Rayanna railway station. That’s not all, it can earn you a free platform ticket too. A squat machine installed at the KSR station will offer a free platform ticket to anyone who can perform 30 squats within 180 seconds on a scale attached to it. The cost of a platform ticket is Rs 10.
This was a popular fitness initiative launched at Anant Vihar railway station in New Delhi last week, which is set to be replicated at KSR station. Divisional Railway Manager of Bangalore Railway Division Ashok Kumar Verma told The New Indian Express, “We have asked the Indian Railway Stations Development Corporation (IRSDC) to replicate it in Bengaluru. We plan to start the fitness scheme first at KSR station and then extend it to other stations, depending on the response.”
India’s first squat kiosk was installed on February 21 as part of the Centre’s ‘Fit India’ programme. A tweet about it by the Ministry of Railways went viral with 2,300 retweets and 9,200 likes within 48 hours. It generated interesting comments too, a majority of them positive. People from different parts of the country requested to install it in the railways stations in their vicinity.
A senior IRSDC official confirmed the development. “The Bangalore Railway Division has asked us to install the kiosk here. We are looking at procuring some funding for it from a company as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility Scheme so that the cost of the machine can be taken care of,” the official said. The IRSDC, which has been entrusted with redeveloping the KSR station, will also be taking control of issuance of platform tickets at the station, he added.
“The Commercial branch of the Bangalore Railway Division had been taking care of it all along,” he said. Indian Railways appears to have drawn inspiration from Russia which installed these machines in Moscow ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games in 2013 to popularise the games. Passengers were permitted to pay their fare via exercise.