It was fairly early in the morning but still difficult to park the car at the Bangalore Central railway station. The car park is at the ground level, as cramped and as difficult to get in as to get out, and has an informal, quintessentially-Indian open air toilet in one corner against a wall, generously distributing its smell.
At the portico, the platform ticket dispensing machine was out of order. So was another one inside. Even if they were working, they would not have made much of a difference. At the best of times, their working can be made out only by the very literate after much concentrated study. They have not been designed keeping the average Indian train passenger in mind.
Inside, before the passenger ticket counters, the sight was again quintessentially Indian. Long queues of patient passengers, easily waiting 15 minutes on average for the very special privilege of being able to buy a ticket and get onto a train.
The trudge to the platform was unexceptionable, except that by the time I got a platform ticket and reached there, our daughter’s train has already arrived and she was waiting patiently. A porter nearby offered what he considered a bargain, Rs 120 to carry the couple of travelling bags of a college girl. We decided to carry them ourselves.
The journey up the long stairs with one of the bags, no matter how light, was trying for a man of my age. Once I got on the on the overbridge, I made use of the stroller wheels of the bag to drag it along but every so often the level changed, making me pick it up and carry it up or down a couple of steps.
Lest someone gets me wrong, Bangalore Central is one of better-run large railway stations in the country. In recent years, it has seen much improvement. The floor of the main hall and the first platform has been redone with posh tiles. There are colour monitors that give you arrival and departures and on a good day, if you have gone to see off somebody leaving on a train from VIP platform one, the experience can make you feel like a VIP.
More improvement is on its way. A steel frame for a canopy will be made outside the station building to create more covered area. But my point is, why have incremental betterment and not recreate to give a totally new look and feel that will do justice to what travellers today can expect. If you can have a new airport in the city, why can’t you have a new railway station when rail travel is back in favour all over the world?
The first and easiest bit to execute is a large underground car park where the present car park is. There you can have a garden, yes a garden befitting the garden city.
The next task would be to do something about the queues at the ticket counters. It is criminal to make people who want to pay wait for so long. Have franchised, networked booking kiosks all over the city so that you already have a ticket when you arrive at the station. The kiosk franchisee’s income should come as retailer’s commission from the ticket value. This will raise ticket sales (revenue) and railways costs (commission to kiosks) too but by not as much as it will cost to have additional railway employees behind new station counters.
All walking stretches like overbridges should be made level so that you can drag your luggage along them. And, now comes the more difficult part, can we have ramps instead of stairs on which you can drag your luggage?
Perhaps the most challenging thing would be to change the look and feel of the entire station so that it is pleasing, has character and scores high on functionality. To design a railway station like this a set of designers, with the help of interior decorators and architects, will have to study the life flow of a railway station round the clock and interview large numbers of station users. This can be done and is not unaffordable; you need not charge passengers a paisa extra.
There is a way to amortise costs. All railway stations, big and small, have common features. So by the time you have redesigned a few you, there can be a template for other railways stations. It can be done. What is needed is the desire to make rail travel pleasing and pleasant and a belief in the wondrous powers of design.
