NEW DELHI: Travelling to Chennai by train or catching a train back from the Tamil Nadu capital? Or visiting Darjeeling or Agra or Jodhpur? You don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for what the place is known for. Kanjeevaram sarees in Chennai, your favourite tea from Darjeeling and the famed marble work of Agra — everything is available at the respective railway stations.
In a first of its kind initiative called ‘One Station, One Product’, the Indian Railways has started using its vast infrastructure and network for the promotion of famous indigenous products. Each station with a stall showcasing the product the place or region is known for. These include handloom and textile products, slippers, wooden and metal handicrafts and a lot more. In the last 60 days, the railways has set up such stalls at 87 stations.
Bangalore’s Channapatna wooden toys, Sholapur’s chadar and bedsheets, Burhanpur’s famous jute-handicrafts, Kolhapuri footwear, Asansol’s terracotta handicrafts, Assamese famous gamocha, Panipat’s pickles, Moradabadi brassware — it’s a long and diverse list.
“Stalls of these handicrafts and famous local products have been set up in the stations to give the products and artisans access to a pan-India audience and customer base,” said Gaurav Krishna Bansal, executive director (Information and publicity) of Indian Railways. Bansal further said that this initiative is getting good response from passengers.
He said that handicrafts, handlooms and other local products, which have become synonymous with the identity of a city or town, have been put up for sale at the stalls making the railway station a hub of sale for local products.
Railway officials have been encouraged by the response and decided that in the next phase of this project, 100 more stations across the country will be identified and similar stalls will be set up in them. So if you are interested in these items and thinking what to do in case you don’t have a lot of time to visit the shops, the railway station is your destination.
Showcasing tradition in stations
Indian Railways has set up shops selling traditional handicrafts items in 87 stations all across the country. There will be 100 more in the next phase of the project
