Title - Funds crunch hurts rail projects

Guwahati, Sept. 3:The ministry of railways has told the parliamentary committee on home affairs that inadequate funds are holding up projects in the Northeast and that it gets less than half of the funds to complete the schemes.
The ministry informed the committee that projects worth Rs 48,000 crore had been allocated for the region and Rs 16,000 crore had already been spent. The committee submitted its report in the ongoing Parliament session.
“The ministry needs about Rs 7,000 crore every year to complete these projects in a designated time frame, but it was only able to get about Rs 3,000 crore, less than half of what it needs,” the committee, quoting the ministry, said in its report.
The ministry is dependent on gross budgetary support for allocation of funds for the projects. Since the ministry did not get even half of what was promised by the Planning Commission, the projects suffered time and cost overrun, the report said.
The ministry said three very important projects, Rangiya-Murkongselek broad gauge conversion with extension up to Pasighat, the Lumding-Silchar BG project and the Bogibeel bridge, were held up owing to inadequate funds. The report said if these projects are completed within the next few years, it would bring about improvement in the rail network in the region.
The Centre decided to clear additional funds for both the Bogibeel and the Lumding-Silchar projects recently.
On a query regarding absence of a targeted time period for completion of certain projects, the ministry said it was concentrating on certain important schemes to avoid spreading of the finances too thin.
“In view of this, it would like to complete certain important projects and then go ahead with others. That was why the ministry did not indicate completion dates for certain projects,” the report said.
On the issue of transfer of railway land at Pandu terminal in Assam to connect it to a national highway, the ministry said 6,000 square metres of railway land had to be acquired but because of 2,150 encroachments, which were still to be cleared by the state government, the ministry could not go ahead with the project.
But according to the finance ministry, it is not funding constraints that are holding up or delaying the execution of national projects in the Northeast but the lack of execution capacity.
The parliamentary committee said there appears to be communication gap between railways and finance ministries. “There is complete discord among the two ministries and the Planning Commission and we recommend that the commission and the ministries meet to resolve the issue and apprise the committee of the exact position in this regard,” the report said.