Chief Minister V D Satheesan on Monday honoured his pledge that the ₹63,941 crore Semi High Speed Silver Line project will be scrapped.
While in opposition, Satheesan’s major contention was that the project would be “ecologically catastrophic” for Kerala. During his post-Cabinet briefing on Wednesday, the Chief Minister identified the environmentally unsustainable nature of the project and the financial difficulties caused to families whose properties fell within the project area as the major reasons for de-notifying the project. “The project was anyway abandoned by the previous government,” Satheesan said.
The LDF government’s plan was to take over 1,383 hectares of land for the project, of which nearly 85 per cent (1198 hectares) is private land. The presence of the yellow-coloured marker stones (‘manja kuttikal’) at the boundaries of private properties made it virtually a dead asset. “These poor families could not pawn their lands for even their child’s marriage,” CM Satheesan said.
The then Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, had said that about 10,000 families would be displaced. But there were fears than more than 20,000 families would be thrown out of their homes once the project gets going.
Partition of Kerala
Environmental concerns have always stood in the way of the Silver Line project.
The design of the project was such that over 300 of the 530 km of the rail corridor will be on a raised embankment that will vertically divide Kerala into two.
Satheesan also spoke about the divisive embankment during his post-Cabinet briefing on Wednesday. “Kerala’s topography has a slope to the west, its rivers flowing into the sea on the west side. To have an embankment 30 feet high for 300 kilometres is not a sustainable design, it would have been catastrophic. In addition, for 200 kms there would have been a wall (this was to protect humans and cattle from accidentally straying into the high-speed line),” Satheesan said, and added sarcastically: “During rainy season, we could have operated the boats along with the trains.”
Metroman E Sreedharan had called the erection of a 10-ft wall on either side of the rail an “idiotic decision”.
Experts had warned that an embankment and a wall blocking the flow of rivers and streams could have created far more devastating floods than Kerala has ever suffered.
The rapid environment impact assessment (EIA) done for Silverline in 2018 itself had identified 164 hydrologically sensitive areas along the proposed embankment. The Detailed Project Report (DPR) itself says that 93 per cent of the alignment is on weak ground.
Niti Aayog, the Centre’s policy think tank, had objected when K-Rail, tasked with taking forward the Silver Line project, claimed that 80 per cent of the embankment stretch were on strong ground.
Suppressed costs
The project cost of ₹63,941 crore was also considered a huge underestimate. According to NITI Aayog, it would be double. Even by its conservative estimate, the cost would be a whopping ₹1.33 lakh crore.
The proposed per-kilometre cost of the Silverline project is ₹120.77 crore. NITI Aayog called it “severely low when compared to similar projects.” E Sreedharan termed it a “brutal suppression”.
For instance, the Delhi-Meerut RRTS (regional rapid transit system) Project, which, like the Silver Line, is a semi high-speed regional rail but lengthier, has a per-km cost of nearly ₹370 crore.
Inflated passenger figures
The projections made for the project also looked suspect.
The Detailed Project Report (DPR) for the Silver Line project estimated that the ridership, or the number of daily trips taken, to be 79,934 in 2025-26 (2025-26 was adopted as the year the semi high-speed rail will become operational in Kerala in the hope that work will begin in 2020-21).
By 2029-30, it was said that the ridership would swell to 94,672, by 2041-42 to 1,32,944 and by 2052-53 to 1,58,946.
“Wildly optimistic” was the term used by experts to describe these numbers. At that point, the traffic volume forecast for the proposed bullet train passing through the super busy Mumbai-Surat-Ahmedabad stretch was less than half of what was predicted for Silver Line.
Even Subodh Jain, a former member of Indian Railways who had argued for the project, had openly said that the daily ridership would only be 30,000.
Moreover, the proposed Silver Line stations at Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Kottayam, Chengannur and Ernakulam were outside the cities and towns. Former Indian Railway Service officer Alok Kumar Verma, who was also the lead consultant of the Silver Line pre-feasibility study, had argued that locating the new stations away from the cities would cause a fall in ridership.
Alok Verma had also said that most of the DPR figures were “fudged” and were arrived at hastily. He said that the DPR, which ideally should have take three years to prepare, was wrapped up in six months.
Rich man’s super fast
Satheesan, while he was the opposition leader, had also called the project aristocratic. The standard Silver Line fare was worked out to be ₹2.50 per kilometre.
The then opposition leader had cited the example of a working class woman to demonstrate that Silver Line was beyond the means of the common man. “Pinarayi says the common man is going to use the semi speed rail in a big way. Imagine a working woman travelling from Kozhikode to Kochi. She will have to shell out ₹450 just one way. Two way, it would be ₹900. So if she travels to work at least 20 days a month, she has to spend ₹18,000 a month. Which common man can afford such a travel cost?”
