A railway site at Ratnu on Hazaribagh-Ramgarh border. (Vishvendu Jaipuriar)

Hazaribagh, Dec. 30: Good news has chugged in for the residents of Hazaribagh and adjoining districts in the year-end.

The long-pending train link project, connecting Koderma with Ranchi via Hazaribagh, will be completed by March 2011, if everything proceeds smoothly. A cash crunch, which has been dogging the ambitious project, has been taken care of with the Indian Railways releasing Rs 60 crore yesterday. More money is expected to be sanctioned in the coming days.

According to sources, the local residents have been long demanding rail connectivity for Hazaribagh. It was only in 1999 that then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee laid the foundation stone for the project at the initiative of then finance minister Yashwant Sinha.

But the project failed to take off, thanks to a number of hurdles — right from Maoist menace to disruption of work by local goons at railway sites. A station could not be constructed at Hazaribagh town due to protests by Kud and Rewali villagers, who demanded high compensation for parting with their land.

A railway official told The Telegraph that with money being pumped into this project, they would now speed up work so that everything was complete by March, 2011. The original estimated cost of the project was Rs 1,200 crore which has escalated to Rs 1,700 crore in 10 years. Indian Railways has already given Rs 300 crore.

However, the biggest hurdle in the form of Telaiya Dam over which a bridge needs to be constructed for passage of the train still remains.

“Telaiya reservoir connects Hazaribagh and Koderma. A Calcutta-based company was roped in to construct a 300m bridge over it at an estimated cost of Rs 32 lakh. But due to the lackadaisical attitude of the government in providing security to the workers, the bridge could not be built,” the official pointed out.

However, he added that if the Indian Railways continued to release funds smoothly, the project would be completed by March 2011.

Local residents believe that with Shibu Soren becoming the chief minister with BJP’s support, the pace of the project would pick up.

They pointed out that Hazaribagh MP and senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha had played an active role in the government formation process and hence, would definitely bat for his own constituency.

A leader of the BJP Yuva Morcha agreed that after the collapse of the BJP government in the state, the subsequent chief ministers did little to revive the long-pending project. “They had purposely turned a blind eye to Hazaribagh’s need for rail connectivity, saying it was Yashwantji’s pet project. But now that the BJP has come to power, we hope that Yashwantji will ensure that the project gets all support from the government as well as construction agencies,” he added.