The wish list presented by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao to Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu last month on his maiden visit to Telangana appears to have made no headway with key projects failing to get the requisite sanction while those that got the nod in the earlier budgets were also given the go by.
At a recent interaction that the Railway Minister had on his first visit to the State with the Telangana Chief Minister, he was presented with a wish list that included several projects that needed the attention of the Railway Board and the Centre.
There was no mention of the Wagon Factory proposed at Kazipet that was sanctioned at an estimated cost of Rs. 152.26 crore but work on which is yet to start. The long-pending demand for a new Railway division at Kazipet got a short shrift. Other sanctioned projects but those that did not find mention in the current budget were the 17.16-km Akkannapet-Medak line and the 56.25-km Bhadrachalam Road-Sattupalli line that needed to be merged with Bhadrachalam Road and Sattupalli alignment upto Chandragonda Station. Also, a new, Rs. 952.95-crore, broad gauge line between Manoharabad and Kothapalli on cost-sharing by the State and Centre was sought to be expedited. The Railways’ share worked out to Rs. 579.72 crore with an estimated annuity of the State government’s share of Rs. 367.05 crore. But only Rs. 20 crore has been earmarked for this line. The patch tripling of Mancherial-Peddampet for a stretch of 21 km, the 200 km-long Manuguru-Ramagundam line, also did not get any money in the Budget.
ADVERTISEMENT
So is the case with the 80-km long Mahabubnagar-Krishna Station line of which only 15 km is completed and on which a lot of land acquisitions and construction of bridges remain pending, sans budgetary allocation. Pending at the survey state is the doubling of the 63.5-km Secunderabad to Zaheerabad line. As for new trains, the Railway Minister himself had said in the Budget that it would be looked into with the Railway Board.