RAILWAY SAMACHAR

J&K Rail Link :

Shridharan

blows whistle on safety

NEW DELHI : Delhi metro chief E Shridharan has blown the whistle on the irregularities in the seven-year-old railway project of linking Kashmir valley with the rest of the country.

If the present alignment of laying the track along landslide-prone mountain slopes is not scrapped, Shridharan said that the project which was due to be completed in 2007 could take another 20 years and the line would still be unsafe and unstable.

In a letter on May 19 to an expert committee reviewing the proposal of changing the present alignment, Shridharan said, "During the last seven years the project on the present alignment could show only a progress of 10%. At this rate, the project would take another 20 years for completion and the cost would go up four to five times. The resultant alignment will not be stable and the high bridges would be highly vulnerable from security point of view."

The last time Shridharan had questioned the bona fides of a project proved to be prescient: weeks before the Satyam scandal erupted, he exposed the undue benefits conferred on its sister concern Maytas by the Andra government in Hyderabad's metro project in which he was a consultant.

Shridharan's intervention in the J&K project follows a request made to him on March 26 by the then Member Engineering in the railway board, S K Vij, five days before his retirement. Having already rolled back the unviable component of building the world's highest arch bridge on Chenab across an unstable gorge, Vij sought Shridharan's help in an obvious bid to counter the powerful lobby within the railways which wanted the present alignment to be retained lest they be held accountable for losses running into hundreds of crores.

Shridharan backed Vij's idea of switching to a straighter and shorter alignment, which is designed to avoid exposure to landslides as it uses advanced technology of tunnelling through mountains from Katra to Banihal. As a corollary, Shridharan endorsed the proposal of increasing the gradient from 1:100 to 1:40 since the entire route would anyway be electrified.

It remains to be seen whether the expert committee, will accept Shridharan's advise to depart completely from the present alignment. The committee headed by former railway board chairman M Ravindra is however under pressure to suggest retention of the present alignment with minor changes. This is because, Vij's successor Rakesh Chopra and Member Traffic Shri Prakash issued an order last month stating that the gradient should in no circumstances exceed 1:80.

The order seeks to undermine the discretion of the expert committee as it makes it harder to straighten the present serpentine alignment and raises the prospect of reviving the much-touted Chenab bridge.