The CPM-led Left Front government in Kerala is set for a collision with the Congress-helmed Opposition over chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s pet project, the Thiruvananthapuram-Kasaragod semi-high-speed rail link called Silver Line, barely a year into the communists’ historic consecutive second term in office.

The ongoing Rs 64,000-crore, 529.45km Silver Line project of the Kerala Rail Development Corporation Limited (K-Rail) is expected to connect the northern and southern ends of the state in a manner that will cut down travel time to four hours from 12.

The trains on the new line are expected to travel at a speed of 200kmph, more than double the usual tempo of trains. It is being considered a lighter version of Narendra Modi’s ambitious Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project, which too had run into a controversy. The CPM itself had joined the agitation against that project.

The Silver Line needs a minimum of 1,383 hectares of land that will include large tracts of wetlands, forest areas, backwater regions, paddy fields and residential and shopping areas with high population density. It is reported that thousands of people will be displaced, businesses will have to be resettled and new houses built.

As per Niti Aayog estimates, the compensation for land acquisition alone will be around Rs 28,157 crore.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency, Hudco, Rail Finance Corporation and the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board are to lend the money required for the implementation of the project.

This would mean a huge burden on the fragile financial situation of the state. Since K-Rail has been set up as a joint venture company between the state government and the ministry of railways, technically the Silver Line has to be cleared by the Railway Board.

As the CPM is going full steam ahead with the implementation of the project, brushing aside the affected people’s objections, many feel the situation has all the ingredients to make it Kerala’s own version of the Singur-Nandigram land acquisition agitations a decade and a half ago that unseated the Left in Bengal after 34 years.

It is a curious situation. While Vijayan is unfazed and is branding anyone who opposes the project as anti-development and anti-Kerala, his party sees all those against Silver Line as opposed to Vijayan the individual. The Opposition has been reminding the government that it cannot bulldoze development over the will of the people.

The refusal of the government to place the detailed project report in the public domain seems to justify the charge. The government’s argument that making the DPR public would endanger the project has failed to convince experts.
“Metro Man” E. Sreedharan, the acclaimed technocrat who hails from Kerala, has termed the project “an idiotic decision”.

According to Sreedharan, the government is fooling the people by underwriting the cost and not revealing the DPR of the Silver Line.

“It was also mentioned that the DPRs of major projects are not made public. This is a total lie. I had prepared DPRs for at least 10 major projects and none of them was kept away from the public. Why should the government fool the people by underestimating costs and hiding facts?”

The Vijayan government is sure to face huge resistance from the general public and environmentalists at the ground level.

There is a fear among the people that the project will literally split the state vertically since a wall erected on both sides of the tracks will be around 13-15 metres high.

Thousands of people will be displaced with no clear-cut rehabilitation plan on paper. Environmentalists have warned of a major ecological disaster, especially in light of recurring floods in Kerala. Parts of the Western Ghats too will be affected, which means the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka will also be harmed ecologically.

Environmentalists such as Medha Patkar have called for a mass protest.

Kerala environment activist and engineer R.V.G. Menon, a Left journeyman, said the project would have an “adverse impact on the Western Ghats as it would require enormous amounts of granite and loose soil”.