PMK Lambasts Plan to Axe 14 Railway Projects.

A day after Express reported that 14 projects in Tamil Nadu are among the 160 that are to be axed by the Railway Ministry, PMK, an ally of the BJP, recently condemned the move and urged the Union government to drop it.

Though some of the projects planned for Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala too were cancelled, the estimated worth of schemes scrapped in Tamil Nadu was several times higher than those in the other States. The government had reasoned that the schemes had been cancelled as their works did not start even years after the announcement.

'The reasoning was not acceptable as it is the duty of the ministry to implement the schemes announced. It is the Railway Ministry that failed to implement them and hence it's not the people who should be punished,' party leader S Ramadoss said in a statement.

The most important scheme dropped was Sathyamangalam-Bengaluru project that spans 260-kilometres at a cost of Rs. 13,951 crore. The Railway Ministry did not take steps to implement the project announced in 1996-1997, Ramadoss said.



THE NEW INDIAN EXPRESS