Puri District Congress Committee president Sarat Rath at a Press conference on Monday lambasted the Naveen Patnaik Government’s decision to develop the Malatipatpur passenger halt into a modern railway station instead of the Puri railway station.
A letter issued by the State’s Commerce and Transport Department last month has asked the district Collector to provide 25 acres of Government land near Malatipatpur to the Railways to develop the passenger halt into a full-fledged railway station keeping in view the Nabakalebar ritual of lord Jagannath scheduled for 2015.
Rath said since more than a 100 years Bengal Nagpur Railways (BNR) turned to SER and now ECoR, the Puri railway station has 216 acres of land of which 42 acres has been encroached by slum-dwellers. Trains beginning journey from Puri were to be parked at night at nearby passenger halts and at times two trains line up on one track as there is no adequate number of platforms for parking the trains at the Puri station.
The railway authorities instead of evicting the encroachers for expansion of the Puri station are trying to shift the arrangements from Puri to Malatipatpur in a phased manner, Rath alleged.
A number of institutions like Puri Sambadik Sangh, Jagannath Sena, lawyers’ association and Puri Nagarik Parishad besides many social activists have strongly protested the move to sidetrack the claims of Puri people and pilgrims. They have dispatched letters to the concerned authorities of the Central and State Governments to scrap the proposal of the State Government and to develop Puri as a modern railway station.
Rath said a ruling party politician has been working against the interest of Puri for his political gains. The people would not tolerate this unjust proposal, he said. Soon a delegation of congress leaders would meet the Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the Railway Minister pleading against shifting of the railway station from Puri and for developing Puri as an international railway station as announced earlier by several Railway Ministers, Rath informed.
Former PCC general secretary Priyadarshan Pattnaik informed that a public interest litigation has been filed in the High Court against the Railways and State Government in this regard. He said since elections to urban local bodies are approaching, the move is a ploy to woo voters living in slums developed on the railway land. Town Congress chief Binayak Dasmahapatra and vice-president Purna Naik were present at the media conference.