VISAKHAPATNAM: Visakhapatnam topped the list of cleanest stations among 75 A1 category railway stations, announced Suresh Prabhu, the Minister of Railways. He released the third party audit report on station cleanliness on Wednesday.
Rankings were given to 16 zones based on the average of total scores achieved by their respective A1 and A stations. Among the overall rankings, South East Central Railway was ranked first with a total of six stations and East Coastal Railway came second with a total of 13 stations.
On the occasion, Suresh Prabhu said that Vizag had emerged as the winner in cleanliness index by securing first position in A1 category and Beas topped in A category stations. Guwahati, Varanasi, Mughalsarai and Hazrat Nizamuddin stations have shown tremendous improvement.
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Survey
The first survey was conducted by the IRCTC in 2016 with interviews of passengers at the stations on various parameters of cleanliness and rating them on their basis.
The second survey has been conducted by Quality Council of India (QCI) which with the help of their partners conducted the survey of 407 major railway stations
(75 A1 category and 332 A category stations) of Indian Railways.
Some of the parameters adopted for conducting the survey include evaluation process of cleanliness in parking, main entry area, main platform, waiting room, (33.33 per cent) direct observation by QCI assessors of cleanliness in these areas (33.33 per cent) and passenger feedback (33.33 per cent).
A 24x7 control room was set up and images were geo-tagged to monitor progress.
The survey was conducted through interviews with respondents on the questionnaire on cleanliness indicators, which was done face to face by survey teams visiting each of the 407 stations across 16 Zonal Railways.
Every passenger was asked to rate the cleanliness of stations objectively on 40 cleanliness parameters.