All political parties, including the ruling Telugu Desam and the BJP, are unanimous in their support for establishment of a new railway zone in Andhra Pradesh with headquarters in Visakhapatnam.
Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, Union Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu, and MPs from Visakhapatnam and Anakapalle K. Haribabu and M. Srinivasa Rao have all been advocating the cause of Visakhapatnam as headquarters of the proposed new railway zone.
Then what’s stopping the Centre from declaring the new zone?
The Left parties are disinclined to buy the argument that Odisha and Chhattisgarh are objecting to the separation of Waltair Division from the East Coast Railway (ECoR) on technical grounds.
CPI(M) State Secretariat member Ch. Narasinga Rao and CPI State assistant secretary J.V. Satyanarayana Murthy opine that the BJP and the TDP are hand-in- glove to deprive Visakhapatnam of the facility and make Vijayawada the headquarters of the new zone.
After the TDP government came to power in the State, the party MPs were silent on location of the headquarters. One section in that party favoured Vijayawada on the pretext that the headquarters should be located near the capital.
Railway trade union leaders have been saying all along that the zone headquarters need not be located near the capital. They have cited the examples of newly formed zones such as South East Central Railway (SECR) with its headquarters in Bilaspur and not Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, and South Western Railway (SWR), which has its headquarters in Hubli and not Bengaluru.
The opposition leaders view the latest developments as a last ditch effort to test the pulse of the people of the North Andhra region before taking a decision either way.
People dsgruntled
The strong resentment among the people has forced the ruling TDP to go in for damage-control.
Anakapalle MP staged a dharna at Gandhi statue in the city on Thursday and announced his decision to boycott Parliament and resign if the situation warranted.
He recalled how the people of North Andhra had been subjected to injustice not only in railway recruitment but also in the extension of originating trains and berth quota to Odisha.
