Kerala Govt bowing to the people’s pressure scraps the rail project averting an environmental disaster
The Rs 1.2 lakh crore Silver Line Semi Speed Rail project linking Kasaragod with Thiruvananthapuram has been scrapped by the Government of Kerala following widespread agitation by the people who would have been thrown to the streets and lost their precious lands. Though experts like E Sreedharan, the legendary Railway Engineer and Alok Kumar Verma, former chief engineer of Indian Railways warned the Kerala Government about the environmental and ecological damages the stand-alone project would inflict on the State in addition to the thousands who would be displaced as a result of land acquisition, an intransigent CPI(M)-led administration went ahead with installing survey stones along the proposed path. A hitherto unseen mass agitation forced the government to do a vault face and call off the project.
This is not the first time Kerala is seeing such a protest. Way back in the 1980s, the then Rajiv Gandhi led Congress Government had decided to set up a nuclear power plant to be built in the High Ranges of eastern Kerala with technical and financial aid offered by the then Soviet Union. This would have resulted in the destruction of hundreds of hectares of lush, verdant rain forests and wild lives. The protests launched under the leadership of M A Varghese, a frail looking professor and his battle cry that the reactor could be built only over his dead body made the Centre see the writing on the wall and spiked the project. Latest developments show that the CPI(M) Government has not learnt anything from these two incidents. The new ill-conceived project is the Sabari Rail to facilitate pilgrims from reaching the holy shrine of Lord Ayyappa atop the Western Ghats. The fact that Sabarimala shrine is opened only for three months every year has not been taken seriously by the proponents of the project. Pilgrims themselves have not demanded for such a rail connectivity because their trip to Sabarimala would not be complete without paying obeisance at more than a dozen temples along the route. This will be better served by the existing road network in the State. The claim by a section of politicians that the rail route would help transporting hill-produce from Idukki district to Cochin Port is nothing but bunkum as plantations that yield tea, coffee, cardamom are getting shut down by the day. Kerala should get its existing rail tracks doubled so that travel time could be brought down to less than half of the present journey. Another separate rail line means more agitations and bloodshed.
