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With Bansal at helm, Punjab, Haryana,
Chandigarh bask in railway budget
Wednesday February 27, 2013 08:19:22 PM,
Jaideep Sarin,
IANS
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Chandigarh:
For nearly three decades, Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh used to
get raw deals in successive railway budgets. This time though,
things changed with with Chandigarh MP Pawan Kumar Bansal being
the railway minister.
With Bansal being a regular traveller on the Chandigarh-New Delhi
Shatabdi Express, the city and adjoining Punjab and Haryana have
got a handful in the railway budget presented by him Tuesday. In
previous years, which railways ministers being mostly from Bihar
and West Bengal, the region seemed to be last on their priority
list.
Last year too, the railway budget had nothing for Chandigarh or
the region.
Haryana, which has a Congress government, seems to have benefitted
the most with a rail coach factory being announced at Sonipat. The
new rail lines announced for the state include the Hisar-Sirsa and
Yamunanagar-Chandigarh sections. The state will also benefit from
better connectivity and frequency of trains running within Haryana.
Bansal, who became the first Congress minister to head the
railways ministry after 17 years last October, originally belongs
to Punjab and has earlier been a Rajya Sabha MP from the state.
While the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal criticized Bansal for not
doing enough for Punjab, the railway budget had a lot for the
state.
The new trains announced for Punjab and nearby areas include the
Amritsar-Lalkuan Express (via Chandigarh), the Chandigarh-Amritsar
Inter-city Express, the Indore-Chandigarh Express, the Una/Nangal
Dam-Nanded Express, the Katra-Kalka Express and the Kalka-Sai
Nagar (Shirdi) Express.
Bansal's new proposals include trains linking the region to
religious places in other states. These include Sikh shrine Hazoor
Sahib (Nanded-Maharashtra), famous Hindu shrine Vaishno Devi (Katra-Jammu
and Kashmir) and Shirdi (Sai Nagar-Maharashtra). Sikh holy places
Amritsar, Talwandi Sabo and Anandpur Sahib also figure prominently
in Bansal's new linkages.
Bansal's wife, Madhu Bansal, had told the media Tuesday that she
had got representations from various sections seeking rail
linkages to religious places across India.
Even before the budget, Bansal got a new Shatabdi Express - the
third - started between Chandigarh and New Delhi. He also
initiated a project to give a complete facelift to the Chandigarh
railway station. In the budget, Bansal announced a few more
initiatives for Chandigarh.
The soft-spoken but articulate Bansal, who is a lawyer by
training, also announced a new factory for repair and
rehabilitation of motorised bogies in Vidisha constituency in
Madhya Pradesh. The constituency is represented in Lok Sabha by
Sushma Swaraj, leader of opposition in the lower house.
Bansal and Sushma Swaraj had studied law together in Panjab
University's Department of Law in Chandigarh nearly four decades
ago.
(Jaideep Sarin can be contacted at jaideep.s@ians.in)
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