The Telangana government has requested that sufficient funding be provided for state railroad projects in the Union Budget Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
K.T. Rama Rao, the state’s minister of industries and commerce, drew attention to the extreme discrimination Telangana was subjected to when funding was allocated for several railroad projects.
The state minister, known as KTR, claimed that despite repeated requests from the state administration, the federal government has refused to approve funding for a number of significant existing and new projects in the state. In every budget that the NDA administration has produced, he claimed, “the state has been getting a rough deal and prejudice in the railway industry is increasingly clear and visible.”
The Union government hasn’t taken any action to create a Rail Coach Factory in Kazipet or approved any new significant infrastructure projects to increase rail connectivity in the state, despite repeated requests from the State administration.
Telangana significantly boosts South Central Railway’s revenue, according to KTR (both freight and passenger). “The most significant railroad junctions in our nation, Secunderabad & Kazipet, are located in this state, which serves as a vital conduit between North and South India. Telangana is a landlocked state that relies largely on the railroad network to convey both people and commerce. The state’s growth story will receive a significant lift from the addition of new railroad infrastructure. However, the Union government falls short in providing Telangana with the necessary support to build new transportation facilities “He added.
The minister remarked that it is shocking to see that only a little over 100 kilometres of railroad tracks have been built in Telangana during the past eight years. Only 3% of all railway lines in the nation are located in the state, and of them, 57% are single-lane. “Telangana is not getting any new trains due to the critical infrastructure shortage. It is disappointing to learn that South Central Railway has just introduced the Lingampally-Vijayawada Intercity Express as a new train the previous eight years from the nation’s capital.”
In Telangana, KTR noted that during the previous eight years, the incumbent NDA Government has not constructed a single new railway line. Even the extremely slow pace of collaborative railroad projects undertaken with the state government.
The state government’s part of the ongoing railroad projects in the state has cost Rs 1,904 crore, according to information provided to the Union Minister. The Union government has only invested Rs 1,100 crore on these projects. The present Union government has put on hold a number of initiatives that had been approved by previous administrations. Numerous additional projects for which survey reports were long ago submitted have similarly made no progress.
KTR demanded that the Railway Board approve high-priority project ideas that had been presented years earlier.
Earlier, he claimed, the South Central Railways would call a conference of all local Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs to consider ideas for new trains and projects. Strangely, he continued, even that convention has been abandoned this year.