Railway officials DNA spoke to said that despite massive amounts of money being pumped into the projects in the North-East, works have not moved much.
One of the biggest challenges before the new government led by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Manipur would be to get the crippling road blockade in the restive state lifted.
Railway officials DNA spoke to said that despite massive amounts of money being pumped into the projects in the North-East, works have not moved much.
The 97.9-kilometre Jiribam-Imphal railway corridor project is one such case, they said. Expected to be the lifeline of Manipur, once commissioned, the project is supposed to fructify by 2019-20, if all goes according to the plan.
The project, which got an allocation of Rs 1,711 crore in the current fiscal (2016-17), has seen a work washout from November last year due to the road blockade, called by the United Naga Council. The project received a huge allocation of Rs 1,400 crore for 2017-18 Union Budget. However, officials say that unless the road blockades get lifted, transporting heavy equipment to speed up work on the multitude of bridges and tunnels on the corridor is not possible.
"The allocation for the project in the past few years has been very robust. We spent around Rs 1,500 crore in 2015-16 and we were supposed to spend Rs 1,700 crore in 2016-17. However, work got severely affected since November 2016 due to the road blockade. Now transporting of materials and equipment is possible only in convoys with the protection of security forces," HK Jaggi, general manager, Northeast Frontier Railway Construction, told DNA.
"The problem is that November to March is the main construction period in the North-East, with the region witnessing heavy rainfall in rest of the months," he added.
Jaggi said that works on the country's longest tunnel — number 12, at 11.5 kms — as well as the world's highest railway girder bridge — number 164, with a pier height of 141 metres — at Noney on the route have already commenced. "The foundation work for the Noney bridge is over and pier work will begin soon. A 12-km patch from Jiribam to Vangaichungpao is already ready and sanction from the Commissioner of Railway Safety has also come in. We are trying our best to complete the project by 2020. It will be a huge catalyst for the development of Manipur," Jaggi told DNA.
The Jiribam-Imphal project has a cost of Rs 5,995 crore, of which an amount of Rs 3,565 crore has been spent till March 2016.
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