Will Railway Minister Lalu Prasad implement his promise that Karnataka will not be ignored in Tuesday’s railway budget ?

The minister’s assurance to a group of agitators from Bagalkot on Saturday that he would justify his “love” for Karnataka by making good allocation to the State projects would be tested at 12 noon when he presents his fifth consecutive railway budget.

But the track record of successive railway ministers including Lalu — save for a brief period when  H D Deve Gowda was the prime minister — has been dismal when it came to allocations for the State projects.

 So much so, the State government had to think of investing its own money — unlike several other states which got the lion’s share of railway projects — in its railway projects.

Interestingly, those projects which are nearing completion are the ones in which the State has shared investments!

Receiving end

A glance at the funds allocated in the recent past is enough to point out that Karnataka has always been at the receiving end of the budgetary allocations. As  many as nine new line projects, three gauge conversions and eight doubling projects have been pending for about 15 years. As against their total project cost of Rs 7020 crore, only Rs 1994 crore has been set aside.

The railway ministry seems to have ignored the fact that gauge conversion projects need less funds than other projects such as laying a new line or doubling. As such the four gauge conversion projects with a total length of 1,175 km, require just Rs 677 crore. But it would require a lot of convincing to do for this to materialise.
Not surprisingly, the conversion of the Hassan-Mangalore line took nearly 20 years despite the State having several powerful politicians from the two districts.

Over a dozen other projects are crying for attention from the railway bosses. Some of them are new line projects of Ankola-Hubli, Bangalore-Satyamangala, Kadur-Chikmagalur-Shimoga (via Hassan-Bangalore), Gulbarga-Bidar (which will lessen the distance between Bangalore and Delhi by 400 km) and Munirabad-Mahaboobnagar, Hospet-Guntkal doubling and Kengeri-Ramanagaram and Yeshwantpur-Tumkur doubling and Mysore-Chamarajanagar gauge conversion.

The Bangalore-Hubli-Shimoga-Talaguppa gauge conversion and Kottur-Harihar new line have been hanging fire since 1992-93 and 1995-96, respectively.