South Western Railway Twitter handles defunct for months

HUBBALLI: When Suresh Prabhu took over as the railway minister, he made all railway officials to have a Twitter accounts to attend to passengers’ grievances on real time. Following his direction, many officials under South Western Railway (SWR) had also opened their Twitter accounts.
However, most of the Twitter accounts have been inactive for almost one-two years. Officials who take care of commercial activities, passenger security and railway safety have left their Twitter accounts unattended.
A retired official told TOI that many officials were not happy to follow up on every tweet along with their regular duties.“Handling Twitter accounts turned a headache as we were supposed to concentrate on our actual work. We were upset as we had to continuously check social media messages and ensure services are provided and help passengers without fail,” he added.
A divisional level official said, “For passengers, it’s just a tweet. But we must ensure feedback for everyone’s tweet. This is a time-consuming process and in doing it, we fail to discharge our duties effectively. Many times, we get tweets asking why this train is delayed, why a toilet is not cleaned, why a fan is not working. No doubt, such issues should be handled. There are many on-field staff to rectify them.”
Asif Belavanaki, an online activist, said Suresh Prabhu’s initiative had a broader perspective to strengthen the relation between public and railways. “He wanted to use Twitter as one of the important tools for passengers to get their grievances attended in a timely way. But bureaucrats always want to maintain distance with commoners and as a result many accounts are defunct today,” he said.
It can be observed that the twitter handles of chief commercial manager (passenger services) SWR and CME SWR are defunct from June 2016 while that of the Chief Security Officer SWR and CPO SWR are inactive from September 2017.
The CESE SWR account was opened in March 2018 and no single tweet was found. Accounts of senior DCM SWR UBL, senior DSC RPF SWR UBL of Hubballi division are inactive from August 2018. But their counterparts in Bengaluru have kept their Twitter accounts active.