CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Studies on alleviating infrastructural services at railway stations have been a recurring theme in research in the Indian context. Endowed with a diversity of natural resources, cultures, and people from various parts of the country, in addition to a colourful historical heritage and physical proximity to several large urban agglomerations, the town of Kharagpur has the essential ingredients for being a vibrant, prosperous urban system.

Kharagpur emerged as a city due to the southeaster railways. After independence, the first Indian Institute of Technology was inaugurated by pundit Nehru in the office building of Hijli jail. It is named after the ancient Khargeshwar temple. Kharagpur is the junction place of major east-west and east-south lines making it one of the major transit junctions in the eastern railway division. Hence, due to its infrastructural and functional scale, it is difficult to maintain given its complexity, number of stakeholders, and physical components designed and developed for previous traffic and track conditions.

The study takes into account three major areas of foundational services catering to the station in terms of infrastructure: Transportation and operational, social and physical infrastructure and services. It attempts to analyse and evaluate the aforementioned areas, conduct a comparative study, evaluate the performance, and eventually propose strategies to alleviate the observed issues taking into account the gap analysis. The significance of the study lies in the historical and symbolic importance of the station as it is a gateway into major cities in the east along with being the most important focal point of economic and social activities.

This report depicts the progress made until the final of phase of research. It establishes the importance of determining and analyzing existing urban pedestrian movements, and also its necessity for the development of overall pedestrian network.