Providing relief to the State Govt, the High Court of Kerala on Monday lifted the stay on land survey for the high-speed rail corridor project, K Rail.
It allowed the contention of the Govt that the survey was held only for assessing the social impact of the project & hence it should be allowed to conduct as per the Kerala Survey & Boundaries Act. A division bench of chief justice Mani S Kumar & justice Shaji P Chaly while nullifying the single bench order on a plea filed by the Govt said it was not heard properly.
A single bench of the Court had stayed the survey on Jan 20 forcing the Govt 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 & it cannot agree with the present alignment of K-Rail.
Opposition parties & a section of environmental activists have been opposing the project vehemently saying it will lead to mass displacement of people & disturb ecology of the state. Despite stiff opposition, the government maintained that it will go ahead with the project.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan wrote twice (in December 2021 & January 2022) to PM Narendra Modi to help expedite the clearance but the state unit of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rushed a delegation to Delhi on Feb 4 with a plea to not give clearance to the project.
The Govt had said that the ambitious high-speed rail project will be a game-changer & will change the face of the state but the Opposition Congress & BJP protested it saying it will turn into another Nandigram (farmers’ uprising against the small car project in 2007 that led to violence & later fall of the left government in West Bengal) for the state & the party.
The Silverline project is a high-speed rail network connecting north Kerala’s Kasaragod & Thiruvananthapuram in south. It needs 1,383 hectares & the state is planning to fund the project using equity funds from the Govt, foreign investments & railway ministry’s part funding.
The proposed rail will bring down the travel time between Kasaragod & Thiruvananthapuram, covering 529.45 km, to only four hours from existing 12 hours & 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 & its alignment is also flawed.
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