The Railway Budget is highly disappointing for Kerala, according to Mathew Paul, State President of the All Kerala Railway Passengers Association.
The long-standing demand of the State for a separate railway zone has not been met. The other important priorities have been track doubling and electrification.
A daily train to Bengaluru has been a long-felt demand. Implementation of automatic signalling system in the network was yet another.
There are no announcements of new lines or even survey thereof, not to speak of the long-pending Kanjikode coach factory, Paul noted. Elsewhere, commuters expressed relief that the Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu has spared them an upward revision in fares.
But there is hardly anything else that the Railway Minister has done to reach out to them, says Jayaraj, who travels in the Kollam-Thiruvananthapuram section.
The green flagging of the suburban railway project between Thiruvananthapuram and Chengannur was a foregone conclusion since the State had already entered into an MoU with the Railways.
The joint venture company to be formed would in turn set up a special purpose vehicle to implement the project, costs for which to be shared by the Centre and the State.
As laying of new tracks are not feasible in land-scarce Kerala, the proposal is to augment existing tracks by installing automatic block signalling with train protection and warning system and run MEMU trains.