The Semi High Speed Silver Line Rail Project (K-Rail as it is known) connecting Thiruvananthapuram with Kasaragod in less than four hours suffered a setback on Thursday as Aloke Kumar Verma, the former chief engineer of Indian Railways who led the team of experts that prepared the feasibility report, termed it as the mother of all scams the country has seen.
“This is the most unprecedented unimaginable professional dishonesty of the highest magnitude India has not seen in the past. The report submitted by the Government of Kerala is a bogus one and is full of discrepancies and suppression of facts,” Verma told The Pioneer on Thursday.
The original proposal of the Kerala Rail Development Corporation Ltd (K-Rail) to the Railway Board was for the Broad Gauge Line. After the Railway Board gave the green signal to begin the planning process, K-Rail hired a consultancy firm SYSTRA and asked it to prepare the preliminary feasibility report and instructed the latter to use broad gauge system. “The K-Rail misinformed the consultants that it had the approval of Railway Board for the same,” said Verma.
The 529.45 long Railway Line to be executed and owned by a special purpose vehicle to be formed by the Government of Kerala at a cost of Rs 64000 crore in five years is already in the eye of a storm as experts like E Sreedharan, the legendary engineer of the Indian Railway who masterminded the Delhi Metro terming it as a technological as well as economical disaster.
Environmentalists like C R Neelakantan ( a former scientist/engineer with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, has warned Kerala of the environmental and ecological disaster waiting to happen once the Government launches the project works.
Verma said that though the project reports submitted by Kerala Government to the Indian Railways envisaged the laying of broad gauge track for the K-Rail, the former changed it surreptitiously to standard gauge. “This means that the K-Rail would remain as a stand alone rail system and would not be compatible with the Indian Railways. High Speed Trains like Vande Bharat Express or Ghatiman Expresses could not be operated in the standard gauge because the rest of the country has broad gauge system of rail tracks,” said Verma.
The decision to shift the system to standard system has been taken at the instance of the Japanese consortium that provides technology and financial assistance to the project, said Verma. He also disclosed that the project would take a minimum of 25 years to complete and the cost would exceed Rs 1,40,000 crore as per the Niti Aayog studies.
Kerala’s whistle blower P C George, the seven term MLA has said that the Silver Line Technology is an outdated one and could be considered as a scrap.
Facing severe resistance from all sides, the Government of Kerala held on Thursday a live debate at the capital city. Only R V G Menon, himself a CPI(M) fellow traveller, was allowed from the panel of critics of the project.
Though Verma too was invited as a participant in the debate, he was unceremoniously kept away. The official panelists could not answer even the small points raised by Menon about the need of a costly rail project like this when Indian Railways could have brought down the commuting time with the existing infrastructure and altering the signal system,” said Neelakantan who too agreed with Verma that the project is shrouded in corruption and scam.