An influential women’s group in Assam has opposed the Railway Ministry’s proposal for an alternative to a hill railway system that suffered extensive damage because of heavy rainfall and landslides in April.
The Ministry had on June 1 sanctioned ₹43.23 crore for the final locational survey of the 208 km Lanka-Silchar rail route via Chandranathpur. The survey was fast-tracked after the 180 km Silchar-Lumding track was damaged at 58 places, cutting off southern Assam’s Barak Valley, parts of Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura since May 14.
Silchar is the headquarter of Cachar district and the nerve-centre of Barak Valley, while Lumding and Lanka are towns in central Assam’s Hojai district. The Silchar-Lumding line snakes through the Dimasa community-dominated Dima Hasao district.
In a letter to Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday, the Dimasa Mothers’ Association (DMA) demanded the revocation of the decision to survey the Lanka-Silchar route as it was “taken anonymously, arbitrarily and without taking into account the stakeholders and the local government”.
Leaders of mothers’ groups representing the Zeme Naga, Gorkha and other communities in Dima Hasao were signatories to the letter.
The DMA said the push for the alternative route was worrying in view of the destruction of the Dima Hasao landscape by the railway authority by undertaking the Silchar-Lumding broad-gauge conversion project without geographical and geological investigation, as had been revealed by an audit report in 2009. Until the conversion, the hill section used to be serviced by a 221 km metre-gauge opened in 1899.
The association said the existing track entailed rampant cutting of earth and trees resulting in the “destruction of our environment, ecosystem and biodiversity”. The new route, it said, could lead to another manmade disaster causing more damage to the hills.
The proposed track will also be economically unviable. While the existing track touches the main towns and caters to 1.63 lakh out of 2.14 lakh people in Dima Hasao, the new track will at most provide service to 51,309 people (according to 2011 census), the DMA said.
The ecological damage written all over the Silchar-Lanka project would outweigh its utility for the India Railways and its users. “Therefore, it is neither acceptable nor negotiable at any point of time and at any cost,” the DMA said.
