March 14: Railway minister Dinesh Trivedi today projected a need of Rs 5 lakh crore to develop railways in the highlands of the Northeast and Kashmir but there is little relief in the short term.

The budget came in for heavy flak from both political parties and industry, which said the region has been deprived and it has failed to meet the aspirations.

Assam PCC president and Rajya Sabha MP Bhubaneswar Kalita summed up the mood of the state and the region.

“We welcome it but with our reservations and grievances. The Northeast has been deprived of its dues even after representation after representation was made to the incumbent minister and his predecessor (read Mamata Banerjee). It has failed to fulfil our aspirations. The region deserves to be on a par with the rest of the country,” Kalita told The Telegraph from Delhi.

The Congress leads the ruling alliance at the Centre, of which the Trinamul is a partner.

The government is formulating the Pradhan Mantri Rail Vikas Yojana, especially for projects in Kashmir and the Northeast.

“The additional funding assistance required is assessed to be about Rs 5 lakh crore under the Pradhan Mantri Rail Vikas Yojana from the government,” Trivedi said in his rail budget speech in the Lok Sabha today.

There are projects planned in Arunachal Pradesh but that will be a long haul.

Trivedi said he proposed to take up a project to connect Agartala, the capital of Tripura, with Calcutta via Akhaura in Bangladesh.

The railway connectivity provided between Agartala and Calcutta via Bangladesh has come as a boon for landlocked Tripura, surrounded on three sides by Bangladesh.

Sources said if the project to connect Agartala with Akhaura in Bangladesh is taken up in this fiscal, it would merely take around seven hours to reach Howrah.

Mangaldoi MP from BJP in Lok Sabha, Ramen Deka, too, was critical of the budget, since nothing substantial was in store for the Northeast, while no deadline had been set for the Barak valley projects.

Senior AGP leader Prafulla Kumar Mahanta said there was nothing for Assam and the fare hike would hit the commuters from the Northeast hard.

The BJP’s Prasanta Phukan dubbed the exercise as non-productive, since implementation of the projects would take 15 to 20 years, especially the Bogibeel project, on which work started in the nineties.

Bodoland Peoples Front MP S.K. Bwiswmuthiary dug out Mamata Banerjee’s promise to set up a coach factory in the Bodoland area, saying: “It is not the first time that there was discrimination against Bodoland; nothing was mentioned by the present minister.”

Federation of Industry and Commerce of North Eastern Region (Finer), too, said the Northeast has again been neglected.

“There are some mere cosmetic announcements in the matter of new trains but the railway minister is silent when it comes to addressing the concerns of Northeast of having rail connectivity throughout the region within a time-bound period through a masterplan in consultation with the stakeholders,” Finer chairman R.S. Joshi said.

The reason for disappointment is not far to seek.

The Northeast got only three of the 75 new express trains proposed by Trivedi.

There are six projects from the Northeast in a list of 84 sent for appraisal to the Planning Commission.

The survey for new projects would include the Imphal-Moreh link which could take railways to the India-Myanmar border.

Manipur, however, is still not on India’s railway map.