According to sources, Minister for Railways, Piyush Goyal would visit Kashmir this month to review the work on the railway line in the Valley up to the north Kashmir district of Kupwara.
Presently, the train in Kashmir connects the south Kashmir’s Banihal region to north Kashmir’s Baramulla region and there is no rail link between Baramulla and Kupwara.
The first-ever train service in the Valley was inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on October 11, 2008, 61 years after India’s independence.
However, the Indian Railways has continued to fail in connecting Kashmir to different parts of India with a proper trainservice and is still “fast-tracking” this project.
Minister for Railways Piyush Goyal has set a deadline of year 2020 for the completion of Katra-Banihal rail line, which has already missed several deadlines.
Train to Kashmir is seen as a project with “strategic significance” as it would help in the mobilization of the Indian Army and paramilitary forces in the conflict-hit State.
Presently, Katra-Banihal rail line is the only missing link for the train to Kashmir.
In October last year, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti had a meeting with Goyal after he took charge of the Railways Ministry from Suresh Prabhu regarding the completion of the rail line to Kashmir and Goyal assured her of the completion of the Katra-Banihal railway track by 2020.
The Katra-Banihal rail link is one of the toughest rail lines in the world and, according to report, the tough terrain in the Pir Panchal mountain range, where a number of bridges and tunnels are to be constructed for the railway line, might not make it possible to meet the year 2020 deadline.
The CM had demanded Goyal to extend the rail line up to Kupwara in north Kashmir and Rajouri-Poonch in Jammu and the railways minister had agreed in principle to the demand and informed the CM that preliminary survey on the two projects had already been completed.
In 2002, the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had declared Jammu-Srinagar rail link as a national project.
The princely state of Jammu Kashmir had got its first railway line in 1897 when the railway line from Jammu to Sialkot was first built.
However, with the partition of the subcontinent, the Jammu-Sialkot line was closed and Jammu was disconnected from Indian railway network.