The Hindu Business Line : Land acquisition a major hurdle for freight corridor projects

At a glance
Dr A.K. Chanda, Chairman of Kolkata Port Trust, made an impassioned plea for the immediate beginning of work on the eastern freight corridor.
The proposed corridor must not terminate at Sonenagar but must extend to Kolkata/Haldia, even to Orissa, he said.

Our Bureau

Kolkata, Sept. 30 More than 8,800 hectares of land have to be acquired for the construction of the proposed dedicated freight corridors, including 5,270 hectares for the western corridor (Dadri to JNPT) and another 3,562 hectares for eastern corridor (Ludhiana to Sonenagar), according to Mr D.C. Mitra, Managing Director of Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd.

Traditionally, the Indian Railways always acquired land twice its requirement and those acquisitions had so far helped it implement several projects without going through the hassles of land acquisition.

Now the problem was becoming more and more real, with the Railways being required pay the market prices in several States even for Government lands for the implementation of projects, he said. “The Japanese agencies that will part-fund the dedicated freight corridors wonder how the problem of land acquisition is going to be resolved at the earliest,” Mr Mitra observed while addressing a seminar on logistics organised by the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BNCCI) here on Saturday.

Cash surplus

He indicated that in the current fiscal (2007-08), the Indian Railways might end up with a cash surplus (before dividend payment) of about Rs 25,000 crore compared with Rs 20,153 crore in 2006-07 and Rs 14,709 crore in 2005-06.

Dr A.K. Chanda, Chairman of Kolkata Port Trust, made an impassioned plea for the immediate beginning of work on the eastern freight corridor.

He, however, felt that there was a need for a re-look at the project profile in the sense that the proposed corridor must not terminate at Sonenagar but must extend to Kolkata/Haldia, even to Orissa.

Also, the corridor must be built as to handle double-stack containers, such as the western corridor; otherwise it would cause avoidable uneconomic cost as the operation would be 40 per cent costlier.

He regretted that the Railways handled 28 per cent of the containerised freight traffic on the west coast and only 4 per cent on the east coast.

cargo handling

The first three cargo handling ports of the country, namely, Vizag, Kolkata and Chennai, were all located on the east coast and yet the west coast ports received more importance presumably because these ports handled more high-value items (containers), whereas east coast ports handled more low-value high volume traffic (coal, ore etc).

Mr A.K. Raha, Member, Central Board of Excise and Customs, said while the dwell time of consignments for customs clearance at the ports had been reduced through the introduction of technology and proper risk management, the payment of duty still took a lot of time due to the lack of preparedness on the part of trade and problems at ports.

Central Warehousing Corporation, according to its Regional Manager, Mr Ashok Kumar, has acquired Railway land on 30-year lease to set up 22 integrated rail side warehousing complexes all over the country and work on nine of them had already started.

Once all these complexes became fully operational, the running of container freight trains by CWC, that started in January this year with 150 trips so far completed, would receive a big boost.

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