UTTAR PRADESH: Last year, travellers between Kanpur and Tundla, a town in the Firozabad district, noticed a welcome addition at most railway stations: small stalls offering free woollens and shawls to passengers, primarily those travelling in general and sleeper compartments, to help them withstand chilly winds while travelling.
This project, which was poetically named “Neki Ki Deewar,” was the brainchild of an officer with perfect intentions. Since Sanjay Kumar, an Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS) officer, was posted in Tundla as the deputy traffic manager, he took the initiative there. Now that he has been moved to Jhansi for the winter, his programme is still helping thousands of passengers at the roughly 50 minor stations that make up the Tundla sub-division, which is part of the Allahabad division of the North Central Railway zone. Sanjay has been an officer who prefers to go beyond his official brief to make a difference in society. So, ‘Neki Ki Deewar’ was just one of the initiatives he undertook.
Besides, Neki ki Deewar, there have been other endeavours as well taken up by Kumar. “We have created an urban fruit forest cooperating with the Forest Department. In Tundla only, we created a mini forest by planting more than 10,000 trees. The responsibility of each and every tree was given to different persons. And all this was done through volunteers. Not even a single rupee of Railways was used,” he told TNIE.
The inspiration for Neki Ki Deewar was his chance encounter with a kid in her mother’s lap struggling to ward off the cold on a chilly night at a railway station that encouraged him to raise his ‘Neki Ki Deewar’. “It was at Jhansi railway station. I saw a small boy wrapped in his mother’s shawl. He was coughing uncontrollably while his mother was trying to wrap herself and him with just one shawl,” he recalls. “It broke my heart and drove me to do something so that such scenes don’t occur,” says the railway officer.
Sanjay decided to help poor and disadvantaged rail passengers of general compartments who couldn’t afford warm clothes. He started this initiative by setting up stalls at prominent spots on the platform of most stations falling in the Tundla sub-division. It was called ‘Neki Ki Deewar’ (Wall of Good) where anybody could donate warm clothing like jackets, scarves, sweaters and shawls.
“These stalls were put up at prominent spots across most stations on this route. We used to put more emphasis on shawls because anyone can use them since sweaters or jackets may not fit. We encouraged people to hang at least one shawl there,” he says.
Kumar believes that working in railways is not merely about transporting people or goods from one place to another. He thinks it is a social organization as well. “It is beyond evaluating the performance of railways in terms of how much income or profit they generated. A thought should also be given to how we perform while taking care of people whom we are responsible for.
As a service provider, our duty does not end only by helping people in travel but also make their journey comfortable,” maintains the officer. Kumar took other initiatives like in order to help the prisoners of Firozabad jail after the end of their term to mingle with the mainstream, he conducted exhibitions of their paintings at a railway station. Moreover, he also opened libraries in the railway waiting rooms to inculcate the habit of reading books among the passengers.