The State government has deliberately sabotaged the Nilambur-Nanjangud railway line to push through Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s favourite Thalassery-Mysuru rail line by not placing the full facts regarding the former before Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai during ae chief ministerial-level meeting held in Bengaluru on Sunday, said technocrat E. Sreedharan on Monday. After a meeting of the two Chief Ministers on Sunday, Mr. Bommai had said that the Nilambur-Nanjangud railway line cannot be agreed to as the line passes through a wildlife sanctuary.
In fact, the Nilambur-Nanjangud rail line was cleared by the Railway Ministry and included in the Railway Budget of 2013. The then UDF government engaged the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) for undertaking the final location survey and sanctioned ₹6 crore for this work. It released ₹2 crore to the treasury to be passed on to the DMRC as the first instalment. The LDF government which succeeded the UDF in 2016 stopped the DMRC from going ahead with the survey and withdrew the money already cleared for the DMRC from the treasury, said Mr. Sreedharan.
