Karnataka - Mangalore

Passengers disappointed over extension of train

MANGALORE: People in the region have expressed disappointment over the extension of Yeshwanthpur-Mangalore Express train up to Kannur, as announced in the Railway Budget presented by Railway Minister Mamta Bannerjee on Friday.

President of the Kanara Chamber of Commerce and Industry Srinivas S. Kamath said: “We used to have scope for booking 400 seats as it is the originating station. Now, only about 60 to 70 seats will be available for us.” Mr. Kamath said he had obtained the numbers from the Railways. He said that the MPs and MLAs from the region should intervene and stop the extension of the train. People would have to agitate against it, he added.

The Puttur-based Rail Yatri Sangha’s technical advisor, Anil Hegde, told The Hindu that the train would now pass through only Mangalore Junction (erstwhile Kankanady) Railway Station, which was on the city’s outskirts and not Mangalore Central Station in the heart of the city.

Mr. Hegde pointed out that the people had fought with the Railways for getting the train introduced here. All this had been lost. Much of the benefits would now accrue to the people from Kannur and surrounding areas at the cost of the people in this region. The people had agitated several times for the introduction of the passenger train between Bangalore and Mangalore, he said.

The Railway-users’ associations based at Udupi, Kundapur, and Puttur, led by former member of the South Western Railway Users’ Consultative Committee Prakash Mandoth, had urged the Railways recently not to extend the train to Kannur. Instead, they had demanded that it be extended to Karwar.

Mr. Hegde said that much could not be expected from the announcement that Mangalore would be made a world class station. There was hardly any scope for addition of platforms and it did not have fuel station for locomotives, he said. Mr. Kamath, however, welcomed the move to upgrade the station.

District unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has said that the Railway budget presented on Friday was disappointing. In a press release, its spokesperson Ullal Ratnakar Nayak said that the proposal to extend the Bangalore-Mangalore night train up to Kannur would only create problems to the people of Mangalore and Karnataka. He said that the budget had not proposed any measures to make train journey accident-free. He said that the proposal to extend Chennai-Mangalore train up to Pondicherry would be an injustice done to the people of coastal Karnataka.

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