At rly station, water you pay for may not be what you get

When this reporter visited the New Delhi Railway Station in the afternoon, a band of urchins was picking plastic bottles from the tracks. After some persuasion, one of them, Raghu, agrees to talk. “We earn about Rs 100 every day. We collect the bottles and then sell them to a contractor for Rs 1 to 50 p, who sends them to company in Samaipur Badli. The bottles are filled with tap water and then sealed. In the evening they supply it to the contractors at the railway station.”

Raghu also points out to the increasing number of enterprising youths who are making a quick buck by filling the bottles from handpumps at the Paharganj end of the railway station and then selling the bottles directly to passengers at the platforms. A stroll around the platform and one comes across these `entrepreneurs’.

The Patna-bound Sharamjivi Express is just about to depart and a group of boys carrying mineral water bottles were briskly doing the rounds of each compartment. By the time the train leaves the platform, all the bottles had been sold. An investigation by Express Newsline reveals that bottles filled with handpump water were kept in freezers of dhabas that pack the roadside on the Paharganj end of the railway station, and then sold to passengers on the trains. The sealing of bottles is done by melting the cut edges of the sealing ring with a candle flame.

Om Prakash, a regular supplier at the station, says: “These days it is so hot that the demand has quadrupled and we manage to seal only some bottles. Some customers don’t bother about the seal. When the train is about to move, all a passenger looks at is how chilled the bottle is, and we charge them anything from Rs 6 to 10.” Senior railway officials say that it is difficult to check the flow of the fake bottles into the station. They allege that the trade has the helping hand of the police. Northern Railway Spokesperson Chandralekha Mukherjee says that in the raids conducted in May, around 500 fake bottles were recovered per week. “We do conduct random checks and take appropriate action.

The bottles are not washed properly and and are filled with water from dubious sources leaving ignorant passengers at the mercy of diseases like gastroenteritis, cholera and jaundice.