Agartala, Oct 7 (TIWN) Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Lok Sabha Member Khagen Das Monday strongly indicted the UPA government at the center for overlooking northeastern region in developing infrastructure including expansion of railway lines in spite of many projects declared as national projects by Prime Minister.

A visibly irritated Mr Das said : “Development of railway lines and conversion of meter gauge lines to broad gauge in southern Assam, Tripura and Manipur are deferred by many years against their targeted dates of finishing.”

“Because of enormous dearth of funds and utter neglect of UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government to the northeastern states, the railway projects have either remained incomplete or going on in a very sluggish way,” Mr Das told reporters.

 Mr Das, also a CPI-M central committee member, accompanied a big parliamentary team that visited in the northeastern region for an on the spot assessment of several infrastructural projects of the region.

 He said that the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) officials told the visiting parliamentary team in Imphal (Manipur) and Aizawl (Mizoram) that sanctioning of very small amount of funds are the key reason for very slow of railway works in the region.

 Coming down heavily on the attitude and policies of the UPA government at the center Mr Das said that despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had declared several ongoing railway projects as national projects, the meager allocation of funds shows absolute negligence towards this northeastern region.

 He said : “Besides the new railway lines in the northeastern states, gauge conversion works between Lumding (200 km north of Guwahati) and Agartala, and Agartala-Sabroom (in southern Tripura) railway extension are delayed due to the central government’s negligence,” he said.

The then prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda had laid the foundation stone for conversion of Lumding-Agartala metre gauge track to broad gauge in January 1996.

The cost of the project has escalated to Rs.2,800 crore from Rs.648 crore in 1996.

The broad gauge railway line from Guwahati passes through Lumding (in Assam's Nagaon district), connecting Agartala and parts of Manipur, Mizoram and southern Assam with the rest of India by a single 109-year-old metre-gauge railway track.

 The parliamentarian said that if the Lumding-Agartala gauge conversion works going on such a pace , it would not be completed by 2017 against the original targeted year of 2010.

 Criticising the central government, Das said that capital cities of Assam and Tripura are the two capital cities in India gets railway link after the country’s independence.

 Agartala is one of the newest stations of the Indian Railways, and came up on the country's rail map in October 2008.

The CPI-M MP said that if the central government becomes sincere, northeast India’s two states – Manipur and Tripura -- would be connected to the railway network of neighbouring Myanmar to link up with the ambitious 81,000 km-long Trans-Asian Railway Network (TARN) making the hilly region’s linkage with Thailand, Laus, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia besides Myanmar.

 “If Tripura connects with the TARN in Myanmar through the adjoining Mizoram, the distance between Kolkata and Myanmar via Bangladesh would be shortened by 883 km than the existing plan to connect northeast region with the international railway network,” Mr Das added.

 The CPI-M Lok Sabha member from the West Tripura constituency asked  that if the northeastern region’s infrastructure including railway lines and roads do not developed, how the economy and industries would grow up in the most backward region of the country ?

 Earlier on August 7, over 5,000 DYFI (Democratic Youth Federation of India) members, demanding early completion of delayed railway projects in the northeastern region, staged a massive demonstration at the NFR headquarters at Maligaon.

 A delegation of DYFI leaders and several CPI-M MPs have also met railway board chairman in New Delhi in August with these same demands.