Faith rides to hill shrines on new rail line
Quietly but surely, the Indian Railways has started work to counter China's world-feted 1,140-km Qinghai-Tibet line, built at a cost of $4.2 billion.
The Railway Ministry has finally allocated Rs 40 crore in the year 2010-11 out of the estimated project cost of Rs 4,295.30 crore for the new rail line connecting Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to Karanprayag in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand. In the second phase, the proposed line would extend up to Mana (height 3,150 metres approx), beyond Badrinath near the China border.
The sanction for the long-pending Rishikesh-Karanprayag project was given by the Railway Board after it got the status of National Project, with all the funding to be done under the auspice of the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA). The announcement in this regard was made in the last Budget session of Parliament. The board had earlier rejected the feasibility of this line as being commercially unviable since the internal rate of return (IRR) was found to be very low.
The proposed railway line between Rishikesh and Karanprayag would mean coming true of the dream project to run a rail track parallel to the route taken by the Ganga from its celestial abode in the Himalayas to the ocean at Gangasagar in West Bengal. As of now, there is an indirect link between Rishikesh and Howrah, but beyond Rishikesh the treacherous mountain terrain is approachable only by road.
Till early part of the last century, the shrines of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri — the Char Dhams of the Garhwal Himalayas — could be reached only by trekking through mountain paths. In the first half of the 20th century, the British built motorable roads. These were opened to pilgrim traffic in 1934. Rishikesh became the popular gateway to lofty mountains of the Garhwal Himalayas. The first segments of road were Rishikesh-Tehri-Dharasu, Rishikesh-Devprayag-Kirtinagar and Kotdwara-Srinagar-Chamoli.
Since the proposed line would run parallel to the flow of Ganga, it would be an engineering to marvel to see how the several confluences of the river's tributaries are negotiated. The Rishikesh-Karanprayag rail line will be 150-km-long, a good 25 km shorter than the road distance. It will traverse through the districts of Dehradun, Tehri, Rudraprayag and Chamoli. The line will facilitate more comfortable and faster travel between Rishikesh and Karanprayag by reducing the pressure on road traffic. It will also allow outstation pilgrims easier access to the Kedarnath and Badrinath shrines.
The Ganga comes into existence at Devprayag with the coming together of two major tributaries – the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda. While Bhagirathi river descends from the Gomukh glacier above Gangotri in Uttarkashi district, the Alaknanda descends at Mana.
Alaknanda river starts at the foot of the Satopanth and Bhagirath Kharak glaciers, near Tibet. The flow from these glaciers takes the shape of a river at Keshavprayag, near Mana, just above the shrine of Badrinath, where it is joined by the Saraswati. The river flows approximately 229 km through the Alaknanda valley, where it is joined by Dhauliganga (Vishnuprayag – 1,372 metres), Nandakini (Nandprayag – 914 metres), Pindar (Karanprayag – 788 metres) and Mandakini Rudraprayag). It meets the Bhagirathi at Devprayag (618 metres), where Ganga river is formed. The Alaknanda is believed to have split off the celestial Ganga when it descended from Heaven.
The rail link from Rishikesh joins the Doon-Howrah line at Haridwar. The Doon-Howrah line, which is more than a century old, runs through the Gangetic plain on the north side of the river before it crosses the Ganga at Varanasi and reaches Mughalsarai, probably the busiest junction in North India. The total distance from Rishikesh to Howrah is 1,529 km.
The first survey for the Rishikesh-Karanprayag rail line was done in 1919 on the initiative of then Deputy Commissioner of Garhwal JM Clay. The second survey was done in 1996 and the project was not found financially viable. In 2009, the Railway Ministry rejected the project again on the same ground. After that, the Union Government decided to take up the line's construction as a National Project, considering its importance strategically and for the region's socio-economic development. The project is likely to be completed by 2019
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