Considering Rourkela as a suitable place for a railway division and setting up a wagon factory in the 1960s, the Biju Patnaik Government had handed over 5,500 acres of land at Bondamunda and 500 acres at Rourkela Railway colony. But the special railway division at Rourkela still remains a pipedream.
Even after the formation of new East Coast Railway Zone (ECoR) at Bhubaneswar, Rourkela was included with the South Eastern (SE) Railway.
Rourkela was not declared a division on the pretext that many railway divisions are nearby it. But Chakradharpur division is 102 km away from Rourkela, Sambalpur division 150 km and Ranchi 160 km from Rourkela.
But distance factor has been waived in a large number of cases. An example is Secunderabad-Hyderabad. The distance between the two places is 10 km, but each is a division. Similarly, Varanasi-Mughalsarai with 17 km distance, Howrah-Sealdah 20 km, Guntur-Vijayawada 34 km have been made a railway division each.
Similarly not making a division at Rourkela is a violation of the guidelines. According to norms, there would be at least one division in each State which comes under a zone. The SER zone consists of West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha. But while a new division was formed at that time ignoring Rourkela, it was formed in Ranchi the second one of the State under SER.
Similarly the guidelines say a zone should have minimum three divisions and each division should have 400 km rail line. Accordingly ECoR has Khurda, Sambalpur and Vishakhapatnam (Waltier) divisions.
According to the commitment of Central Government, at the time of Andhra Pradesh split, Vishakhapatnam will be a separate zone. Then its area Koraput, Malkangiri, Rayagada and Gajapati which contributes 40 per cent revenue to ECoR but they will be detached from ECoR.
Hence, one new division under ECoR must be formed and the revenue loss compensation aspect needs to be taken care of.
So in this contest Rourkela is the only alternate. Because under Chakradharpur division, Sundargarh, Jharsuguda and Keonjhar districts come, contributing 70 per cent revenue of the division. If Rourkela division is formed with these areas then the ECoR will have more revenue.
At present the total rail line is more than 600 km. It would be 895 km once the proposed Bimlagarh-Talcher, Bimlagarh-Bansapani and Jharsuguda-Sundargarh-Talsara line work completed. Similarly, Rourkela is one of the model stations of the country.
Besides the other reasons justify in favour of Rourkela are in Bondamunda an ARM office is there which can be upgraded to DRM office. As no DRM office or wagon factory was established at Bondamunda more than 1,000 acres of land are encroached. That is why the displaced are upset. So with the formation of a new division, the encroachers will be evicted. Similarly as per the present guideline railway may not require the help of Odisha Police for eviction as it can deploy Railway Police and RPF.
Many staff quarters are lying vacant in Bondamunda; so there would be no residence problem for DRM staff. Bondamunda is the second largest marshalling yard of Asia and the facilities for repairing of locomotive, diesel and electric engines are available here. To repair at least 200 engines in a year, the Railways has sanctioned Rs 100 crore and another Rs 100 crore is in pipeline to double the repairing capacity. Most significantly, if Rourkela becomes a division the most awaited Bimplagarh-Talcher project will be expedited as there will be more funds flow and ease for engineering supervision.