Vij, a 1970 batch officer of the Indian Railways Service of Engineers (IRSE), cited the poor work progress on the section, mainly resulting out of the fragile Himalayan ecology, as the reason behind the rethink. He was candid enough to admit that the ministry had rushed into the project under pressure without the required planning and hence, corrections were needed.

“The alignment crosses three major thrust zones and two fault lines at oblique angles, besides running almost along them for about 40 km length. For much of the length, the alignment runs close towards the face of the hills, crossing a series of khads that would require tall bridges and crossing ridges of the rugged mountain slopes. A number of tunnels are to be built at shallow depth and underneath water channels. Scope for landslides is large, endangering bridges. Some unstable tunnel face slopes have collapsed already. The original envisaged period of construction was over more than a year ago and progress is 10 per cent,” Vij wrote to the then Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

By then, the Railways had already invested Rs 750 crore on this section and had awarded contracts worth Rs 1,000 crore. The mere thought of a realignment entailed the possibility of abandoning works worth Rs 400 crore on the stretch. A possibility that was sufficient to send shivers down many a spine in Rail Bhavan, the ministry’s headquarters in New Delhi.

But even within the ministry there was talk that the Railways was willing to abandon work worth a few hundred crores since the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Line project, after being declared a “national project” in 2002, was being funded from the Consolidated Fund of India and not by the Railways Ministry. So the Ministry was assured that funding would never be a problem for this project and was not worried if money already spent went down the drain.

... contd.