AFVOA Newsletter May 2020

Section 3 - Memoirs Newsletter No. 1 / 2020 P a g e 36 | 101 A visit to their Operations Control Centre followed the presentation. Wow! It was no different from Chandrayan’s Mission Control Room that we are all familiar with now. Very elegantly designed with a panoramic overview of all trains in operation and live video view of all Metro Stations. Every query from the audience, mostly from our knowledgeable Ladies, was answered expertly and comprehensively by the Officer-in-Charge. We made our way to CMRL’s state-of-the-art Maintenance Depot which is located a few hundred meters away. Mr. Thiagarajan, a very experienced Railway professional gave a brief introduction which was followed by a video clip covering all aspects of Metro maintenance. A floor visit was next. If you had imagined a dusty, oil wreaking, waste smelling, tools-strewn-all-around kind of a shop floor, you were in for a pleasant surprise indeed. There were more of white collared Laptop carrying Engineers than tool wielding mechanics in oily overalls. Clearly sign posted, spotlessly clean, extremely orderly and epoxy painted floors greeted us. An uninitiated late joiner would have thought that we were visiting a Rail Museum and not a maintenance shop floor. The very ambience prompted all our veterans and the ladies to go on a selfie spree! CMRL has many firsts to their credit, including employing more women than the 33% mandated by the government but the audience, and Chennaites at large are blissfully unaware of CMRL’s achievements. While the footfall has been gradually growing, it has not matched the expected pace. Among the multitude of positives, lack of adequate publicity stood out like a sore thumb! The sobriquet “Silent Service” may perfectly fit a lethal, fighting service like Navy but a public utility like Metro would need a different doing. The CMRL team humbly acknowledged the ground realities. After interacting with CMRL’s diehard professionals today, we know that CMRL will grow out of this teething problem soon and shall reach a position of being counted as a default commuting option with a much larger footfall. There was an orchestrated demand from south Chennai based veterans for Metro connectivity to Adyar. I too joined in for two reasons – one, for connectivity and the other, to put in my claim for damages for a small crack in my kitchen sink that I noticed yesterday!