Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday urged that infrastructure development should be kept away from politics and alleged that the previous government did not show the required seriousness and urgency to communicate with the States, resulting in delays in implementation of projects.
Mr. Modi was speaking after flagging off the first train to run on the 351-km New Bhaupur-New Khurja section (both in Uttar Pradesh) of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC). He also inaugurated the operation control centre for the EDFC at Prayagraj via videoconference.
The newly opened section has been built at a cost of ₹ 5,750 crore and has been funded by the World Bank. It passes through Kanpur Dehat, Auraiya, Etawah, Firozabad, Hathras, Aligarh and Bulandshahr districts, covering the important industrial areas of Aligarh, Khurja, Firozabad and Agra. The entire eastern corridor is over 1800-km long and will run from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni near Kolkata, traversing Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand.
Meanwhile, the Operation Control Centre (OCC) will act as the command centre for the entire route length of the Eastern DFC for controlling and monitoring all systems, including train operation and power supply system.
The Prime Minister blamed the ‘work culture’ of the previous government for the delays in implementation of the dedicated freight corridor project that was approved in 2006.
“Till 2014, not even one km of the track was laid. Even the money allotted for this was not used properly. After 2014, when the project was relooked at, the budget increased by 11 times or by more than ₹45,000 crore,” he said. After the formation of the NDA government in 2014, as a result of constant monitoring and meeting with the stakeholders, about 1,100 km of the work got completed in the next few months, he claimed.
“Be it our farms, industries or markets, they are dependent on freight movement and the railways have always played a huge role in this,”he said. Dedicated freight corridors were needed in India as currently passenger and freight trains ran on the same track and sometimes passenger trains were stopped at stations to give way to freight trains. This not only led to delay of passenger trains, but also for freight trains due to lower speeds and frequent stops, which increased the cost of freight movement,” he noted.
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Punctuality of trains
“With these corridors, we can improve the punctuality of passenger trains. In addition, freight trains can run three times faster, and will be able to transport twice the amount of freight as these tracks can run double-decker trains... Since freight trains will reach on time, this will bring down the transportation costs, leading to reduction in cost of various goods,” he observed.
The negative impact of political indifference towards infrastructure impacted the entire railway system. Earlier the focus was just on increasing the number of trains to get votes, but no investment was made on tracks on which they running, he pointed out.
“A country's infrastructure is not the ideology of any party, but the path of development of the country. If political parties want to compete, they should compete on infra quality, speed and scale,” he stressed.
“I want to mention one more mentality that we often see during protests and agitations. This mentality is to hurt the country’s infrastructure and property. We should remember that this infrastructure does not belong to any politician or a party, but to the country and its citizens. While expressing our democratic rights we should not forget our responsibility towards the nation,” he added.
