Railway minister takes a mini ride, interacts with commuters

For the first time after taking over the office two years ago, the Union railway minister Suresh Prabhu rode a local train with the commuters and also interacted with them. But the minister could manage the train journey for only 13 minutes.

Mr Parbhu boarded a train from Currey Road to CST and interacted with the commuters asking them if they are satisfied with the services. The minister had undertaken the journey to check the ongoing work at a foot-overbridge, on Thursday.

Before undertaking the journey, the Union minister said he would like to interact with the commuters first and climbed into the middle first-class coach around 1pm. After his brief interaction when the minister was asked if he would be introducing anything new for the Mumbaikars, Mr Prabhu said, “I have received a lot of inputs from the commuters. In fact I get thousands of them everyday and I have been trying to implement these suggestions as and when I can.”

Mr Prabhu had recently asked all divisional railway managers and principal heads of department to open their own Twitter handle and communicate directly with the passengers to encourage railway officials to be aware of the problems within the system directly from the source.

During his 13-minute journey, a couple of he commuters pointed to the fans of the train and complained to the minister of the near-zero-ventilation inside the crowded trains in the city’s humid summer days.

Another commuter complained about how the foot-overbridge connecting Dadar east to west is not wide enough while yet another commuter informed the minister that trains are often delayed due to trespassing at the Ghatkopar station.

Interestingly, another commuter managed to wriggle his way up to the minister inside the completely packed coach and gave him a wedding invitation for his daughter’s marriage. “Please try to come to the wedding if you can, sir,” he was overheard saying with folded hands.

Central Railway (CR) had tabled a separate train for Mr Prabhu at Kurla in order to transport him from Currey Road to CST but the minister thought that it would be wiser to go in a usual local train.

Although when asked about his plans of running the bullet train underwater, the minister said that he would speak after the meeting with chief minister Devendra Fadnavis in Mantralaya. “I can’t tell you anything until I speak to the CM,” he said, before getting off at CST to head out for his meeting with the chief minister.