Residents seek completion of railway link to Beas

Sometimes, the light at the end of the tunnel is of a train! But not in this case as the 40-km Qadian-Beas rail link remains incomplete despite the fact that the Britishers commenced work on it nearly a hundred years ago.

Efforts from political figures like Partap Singh Bajwa, who took up the issue several times when he was a Lok Sabha MP, have gone in vain. Ex-Gurdaspur MP and film icon Vinod Khanna, too, tried to convince the railway ministry but did not find much success.

In the Indian context, public welfare projects getting delayed by months or even years is a normal phenomenon. However, this one takes the cake as petty-politicking remains the villain of the piece.

Now, voices to get the track established have gotten shriller with residents relying on Gurdaspur MP Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa and MoS for Railways Ravneet Bittu to take up cudgels on their part.

The project is strategically important. Qadian is the international headquarters of the Ahmadiyya Muslims while Beas is the seat of the Radha Soami sect. The economy of the area is bound to get a boost once the rail starts running because distances between cities will be considerably reduced. The track also has the potential to revive the ailing industrial units of nearby Batala.

In 2010, acting on public demand, Gurdaspur MP Partap Singh Bajwa, who enjoyed a personal equation with former Railway Minister Mamta Banerjee, put forward a proposal to the railway ministry mandarins. He had to face several road-blocks, and managed to clear all of them, before the ministry finally sanctioned the project under the category of ‘socially desirable projects.’

A Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) minister of the area, sensing that Partap would get the credit, derailed the project by organising protests against the railways. His alibi was that the farmers were not getting adequate compensation for the land to be acquired. Nearly 150 hectares of land was to be taken over by the government.

Despite the protests, Bajwa got a team of the Railways to conduct the mandatory survey also called the ‘final location survey.’ Everything was going in the right direction. The venture was to be completed by 2024. However, the SAD minister played spoilsport and again incited the farmers to hold demonstrations despite the fact that survey on 4.5-km stretch had already been completed. The railways finally decided to put the project in cold-storage.