Providing relief to the state government, the Kerala high court on Monday lifted the stay on land survey for the high-speed rail corridor project, K Rail.
It allowed the contention of the government that the survey was held only for assessing the social impact of the project and hence it should be allowed to conduct as per the Kerala Survey and Boundaries Act. A division bench of chief justice Mani S Kumar and justice Shaji P Chaly while nullifying the single bench order on a plea filed by the government said it was not heard properly.
A single bench of the court had stayed the survey on January 20 forcing the government to move the division bench. During the hearing, the Union railway ministry had filed an affidavit that the ongoing land acquisition proceedings can be stopped as the financial viability of the project was questionable and it cannot agree with the present alignment of K Rail.
Chief minister (CM) Pinarayi Vijayan wrote twice (in December, 2021 and January, 2022) to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help expedite the clearance but the state unit of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rushed a delegation to Delhi on February 4 with a plea to not give clearance to the project.
The government had said that the ambitious high-speed rail project will be a game-changer and will change the face of the state but the Opposition Congress and BJP protested it saying it will turn into another Nandigram (farmers’ uprising against the small car project in 2007 that led to violence and later fall of the left government in West Bengal) for the state and the party.
The Silverline project is a high-speed rail network connecting north Kerala’s Kasaragod and Thiruvananthapuram in south. It needs 1,383 hectares and the state is planning to fund the project using equity funds from the government, foreign investments and railway ministry’s part funding.
The proposed rail will bring down the travel time between Kasaragod and Thiruvananthapuram, covering 529.45 km, to only four hours from existing 12 hours and it will be completed by 2025, said an official from Kerala Rail Development Corporation Ltd, the nodal agency for the proposed project.
However, many experts, including “Metro Man” E Sreedharan said that the high-speed trains are not feasible to run on wetlands and its alignment is also flawed.
