In Kerala, clouds gather over SilverLine rail corridor project

Kerala’s ambitious semi high-speed rail corridor project faces stiff resistance from environmentalists, villagers, prominent citizens and others. Hiran Unnikrishnan and M.P. Praveen report on the arguments for and against the contentious project that the Pinarayi Vijayan administration is determined to complete

For three sultry days in January, there was a lot of commotion in the idyllic village of Parakkadavu on the banks of the Chalakudy river that flows through the northern outskirts of Ernakulam district in Kerala. It revolved around the controversial SilverLine project, the proposed 529.45-km semi high-speed rail corridor connecting Thiruvananthapuram in the south with Kasaragod in the north at an operating speed touching 200kmph. Votaries see it as a revolutionary move to upgrade travel, while detractors decry it as a vanity scheme, citing budget, technical and environmental concerns.

On January 19 morning, a posse of officials turned up at Triveni, ward 16 of Parakkadavu panchayat, for laying survey stones for the SilverLine project. They hardly expected to face stiff resistance from people with different political affiliations and were forced to beat a hasty retreat.

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Snubbed, the officials returned the next day, accompanied by the police. “We did not expect them to come back so soon. Most of the people who were part of the protest had gone back to work and the few who were present could not oppose the might of the official machinery,” said Nidhin Saju, member of Triveni and patron of the local K-Rail Virudha Samithi (anti-K-Rail protest committee).

Guarded by police personnel, the officials laid 15 survey stones, some of them in the middle of ripe paddy fields, that day. As discontent grew, it was decided at an emergency meeting of the Samithi that the protest would be amplified. All the survey stones were uprooted by January 21 afternoon. Wreaths were placed on many of them along the alignment of the proposed project.

“We have realised that the proposed rail will go right over our houses and property. It will divide our one-and-a-half acres down the middle. Till date, there has been no official communication from any authority about the acquisition that will leave us displaced from the land where our family has lived all along. Even a notification about a proposed Social Impact Assessment in the media was in English. A majority of the people here are ordinary farmers. How are they expected to understand it,” asked Abhiya Antony, an MBA graduate who passed on the information to others.

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