Sept. 4: Eastern Railway is banking on Bollywood to keep Howrah station clean.

It has been almost a year since the Howrah division had put up Hindi film posters to spread the message of cleanliness.

The authorities believe the posters have worked though people still litter the station.

A poster of Deewar has the tweaked version of the famous Mere paas maa hai dialogue - Mere muh mein paan hai. A one-liner follows: Par mat thukna.

"Simple and catchy is the buzzword," Manu Goel, Howrah divisional railway manager, said.

The railways did not hire any agency. An in-house team zeroed in on Bollywood and came up with the campaign. "It wasn't a tough choice. Nothing sells like films," a railway official, who was involved in the project, said. "It's a low-cost idea."

The railways spent only a few thousand to print the posters, he said.

The station has 105 posters spread across platforms, Goel told Metro.

Anand, Sholay, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge are some of the other films that inspired the campaign.

The team picked one famous dialogue from each of the films and tweaked them to go with the cleanliness campaign.

A Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge poster shows Kajol's Simran trying to grab the outstretched hand of Shah Rukh Khan's Raj leaning out of the door of a moving train.

The poster is headlined Ja Simran Ja. Below the picture it says: Platform bhi saaf rakhte hue ja.

Sholay's Gabbar Singh asks Sambha the fine one has to pay for littering the station. Arrey o Sambha... Kitna zurmana rakhe hain sarkar gandagi failane par... 500 rupay, poore 500.

Every day, 25 tonnes of solid waste are cleared from the station that sees 950,000 people on an average.

The litter on the station premises includes almost everything from plastic cups to stale food.

It's a mammoth task to clean the mess, an official said. More than 100 sweepers clean the station and 250 dustbins twice a day, he said.

The railways commissioned a cleanliness survey last year. Howrah station had scored 497 out of 1,000.

This year, the score is 622, a 25 per cent jump, the official said. "It ranked 56 among 75 A1 stations in the country."

"There hasn't been a significant change in the quantity of waste but the campaign has had an effect," Goel said.

The posters have grabbed the attention of people, another official, who wasn't involved in the project, said. The change has to come from people; otherwise no campaign will produce results, he said.

A case in hand is the city's lifeline, Metro, which is way cleaner.

Why? The credit goes to the tens of thousands of people who use it daily, the official said. But do the same people behave differently at Howrah station? Maybe.

Goel's predecessor Badri Narayan was the brain behind the poster project. The intention was to transform a mundane job to something catchy that would strike a chord with people. "The challenge was to grab the attention of people already on an overdose of advertisements," Goel said.

Sweta Singh, who's with an IT major in Rajarhat, said she was used to cliched messages like cleanliness is next to godliness. "The DDLJ poster stopped me in my tracks," the 29-year-old, who takes a train twice a month to visit her hometown, Ranchi, said.

Even the social media's been talking about the posters. "Is this the first instance of meme-ification of public service messages? Is this the future?" one user asked on the DRM's Twitter page.

"We have decided to continue with the poster campaign using hit films," Goel said. "Next in line are Bengali blockbusters... posters will be put up at other stations of the Howrah division."