Delhi rly division goes eco-friendly

new delhi: Keeping in tune with the theme of the World Environment Day 2022 "Only One Earth," the Delhi division of Indian Railways has launched "Waste Management and Resource recovery" project at New Delhi Station.

In an article written by Praveen Kumar, IRTS, he says that railways, on an average, carries 22 million passengers daily and transports around 1.2 billon tonnes of freight traffic every year over a huge network of approximately 68,000 kms.

By launching Waste Management and Resource recovery project, Delhi Division has played a pivotal role in its mission to achieve a sustainable model of clean and green environment.

Following NGT's guidelines for bulk generators to manage its own waste, the Delhi Division of Railways developed a pipeline towards building a sustainable infrastructure which has revamped its erstwhile 'expenditure model' into 'revenue generation model.'

With the aim of ultimately curb the cumbersome task of 'Waste Management' being faced at platforms and on tracks alongwith ensuring generation of revenue through the waste. It's a paradigm shift since it has converted an expenditure model into revenue generation model by fetching NFR revenue.

Besides this, it will also save manpower & other related costs involved in waste segregation work. Since long, waste collected at station used to be unsegregated and disposed off with municipal wastes and sent to landfills or burnt or dumped near the tracks.

In fact, the whole system was marred by lack of substructure to manage massive amount of plastic waste being chunked out of the system.

The plastic waste used to choke drains and/or embedded in soil spoiling agricultural productivity.

Due to all this, a dire need was felt to create a concrete plan to control plastic waste, specifically for NCT of Delhi, which handles the greatest volume of plastic waste, both at the railway stations and along the tracks.