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KAURI, SALAL (J&K): Darshan Singh occasionally walks down a steep gorge, steers a boat to cross the River Chenab and then climbs a stiff terrain to meet his relatives in Bakkal village. It was almost 30 years ago when Darshan, then a six-year-old, first embarked on this arduous expedition as part of his uncle Onkar Singh's baarat (marriage party).
In about two years from now, the two sides of the River Chenab will be joined by a humungous steel bridge, being constructed with 24,370 tonnes of steel at a height of 359 m above the riverbed.
Young Darshan and other baarati from Salal village spent the night at the bride's home only to return the next morning. Darshan later made many such trips without making any fuss about the lack of roads and bridges. He knows that geography has never been kind to the people in Salal, Bakkal, Kauri, Kanthan and other neighbouring villages in Jammu and Kashmir's Reasi district, about 100 km north of Jammu.
But winds of change may be beginning to blow. In about two years from now, the two sides of the River Chenab will be joined by a humungous steel bridge, being constructed with 24,370 tonnes of steel at a height of 359 m above the riverbed.
Once constructed, this Rs 1,198 crore bridge will be the tallest railway bridge in the world, surpassing the record held by the Beipan river Shuibai railway bridge (at 275 m height) in China's Guizhou province.
The 1.315-km-long bridge awarded in 2004 has missed many deadlines along the way; the first D-day of February 2007 went by because of non-consensus on alignment, delay in finalisation of designs and court cases. The reset target date: August 2018.
"It's a bridge that won't merely connect us with our relatives. It's a bridge of hope that will narrow the gap between Jammu and the Kashmir Valley," says Darshan, touching upon the divide that exists between the Jammu region and the Valley, something that only exacerbated after Hizbul commander Burhan Wani was killed by security forces in an encounter on July 8.
Like most other parts of the Kashmir Valley, protesters and stone-pelters targeted sections of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link, forcing the Northern Railways to temporarily suspend train services on the 136-km Banihal-Baramulla stretch, which includes stations such Srinagar, Pampore and Anantnag. Till train services were suspended, as many as 10 pairs of passenger trains were running on a single day, with overwhelming response from the people.
Terror-Proof To be sure, there has been apprehension from day one that the signature Chenab bridge, just 60 km from the LoC with Pakistan, could be a potential target for terrorists, and even the possibility of aerial att vacks was factored in.
The engineers building the bridge claim that this will be India's first railway bridge that has in-built antiterror features. After consulting with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the bridge has been designed in a way that even if one of the 17 piers is blown up, it won't result in the bridge collapsing. Further, the deck of the bridge can take a blast load of a specified trinitrotoluene (TNT), and even if a blast of two and a half times that load takes places 20 m away from the bridge, what it will need are just some repairs.
ET Magazine withholds the information on the exact amount of blast load the Chenab bridge can take for obvious security reasons.
Yes, it's a preparation for future, but the reality today is that Kashmiri militants have not disturbed the construction of the rail line both in Jammu and the Valley. "No extremist group has targeted our Kashmir project. There has not been a single case of killing or kidnapping of persons involved in this project.
Extremists too know it's a pro-people project," says Anurag Sachan, chief administrative officer of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link project.
The idea of laying rail tracks in Kashmir goes way back to 1892. King of Kashmir Maharaja Pratap Singh laid a foundation of a rail link between Jammu and Srinagar, a project finally abandoned only in 1925 when the Maharaja died. It was the time when rail lines were also built between Wazirabad (now in Pakistan) and Jammu, mainly to facilitate the sugar trade. That line was discontinued after Partition in 1947.
Post-Independence, there were stray attempts to build rail lines in Jammu and Kashmir. For example, the Kathua-Jammu rail link was the first to be opened back in 1972.
In 1981, the Jammu-Udhampur rail link was sanctioned and, 13 years later, it was announced — when PV Narasimha Rao was prime minister — that the rail line would be extended to Srinagar; work, however, began only during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's regime between 1998 and 2004.
Bridging the Gaps Once completed, the link will be a 326-km rail line from Jammu to Baramulla. After the 54-km Jammu-Udhampur section was launched in 2005, the then UPA government decided to name the remaining 272-km stretch as the Udhampur- Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link project. Till now, lines at both the ends — 136 km between Banihal and Baramulla in Kashmir Valley and 80 km between Jammu and Katra — are fully operational, with only the 111-km stretch between Katra and Banihal left to be constructed.
But this Katra to Banihal missing link is no engineering cakewalk. The alignment, which was challenged by none other than railway veteran and former Delhi Metro chief E Sreedharan, passes through 27 tunnels across 97 km, the longest being the 12.75 km Tunnel-49. And the total length of the 37 bridges, including the high bridge over the Chenab, is over 7 km. In other words, trains will eventually run either inside a tunnel or on a bridge across 104 km, or 94% of the section.
During the British era, India witnessed construction of two major hill rail lines — one in Shimla and the other in Darjeeling. But both were designed for running what's called "toy trains" (narrow gauge) with a speed of 10 to 15 km per hour. The Katra-Banihal section has been designed for speeds up to 100 km per hour.
Sreedharan, who was part of an expert committee looking into the safety of the line, proposed a direct route through long tunnels, cutting across fault zones and thereby reducing the overall length of the line.
He wanted the Chenab bridge to be constructed at a lower height before taking the line steeply up, something the Railway Board was not comfortable with. In 2013, Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan on behalf of the Centre for Public Interest Litigation filed a public interest litigation, asking for a review of the entire alignment for the Katra-Banihal link with an appeal to the court to direct the Central Vigilance Commission to inquire into the financial losses, wastages and the conduct of the ministry of railways as identified by a CAG report.
The Railway Board summarily rejected the idea of a new alignment, claiming that the existing alignment is "a well-researched, well-investigated line where work is progressing successfully without any mishaps or problems" and then calling the new alignment as advocated by Sreedharan as only a "paper alignment". Early this year, the Delhi High Court disposed of the case and the Supreme Court last month refused to entertain an appeal. "We have no bottleneck now (after the court case). It's a pro-people project.
Our alignment took into consideration the benefit to the maximum inhabitants. Thanks to this project, 200 km new roads were also built. We now need to finish the project on time," says Sachan.
The big question, though, is: After shifting the goalpost several times earlier, will the railways be finally able to close the project before the 2019 Lok Sabha poll?
This writer noticed some sense of urgency at the Chenab bridge project site where over 1,300 people were working. "There is a momentum now. People here are working 24x7," says Rashmi Ranjan Mallick, a deputy chief engineer level officer stationed at the project site.
Story of a Railway engineer working at a site far from home
Railway engineer LS Khalsa has been working at the Chenab bridge project site in Kauri village, 115 km north of Jammu, for the last 10 years. He has many a story to tell — how the survey team that spotted the site used ponies and carried food and sleeping bags and spent several nights in villagers' homes, as there was no motorable road leading to the site.
Khalsa with his colleague Md Rashid Mehmood, also an engineer currently monitoring the steel fabrication workshop at the Srinagar end of the bridge, spent a number of years together in a western Bangladesh project where they retrofitted the British-age Jamuna bridge for trains that could run at a speed of 100 km per hour.
Both the engineers had then worked for IRCON, an Indian rail PSU that executed the foreign project. Now, both of them are on deputation to Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd (KRCL) which is overseeing the project and are "happily" sharing accommodation at the Chenab bridge project site, far away from modern city amenities and avenues for recreation.
"Compared with our project in Bangladesh, the Chenab bridge is a very difficult project. Many of the technologies used here are new. And also it's in Kashmir. You leave your family behind and work in this difficult terrain. But extremists have not targeted our rail project at all," says Khalsa. "I sometimes miss a game of cricket," adds Mehmood who was a junior state-level cricket player for Uttar Pradesh and has also played for the Indian Railways.
If officers and employees were willing to take up this project, it's also because there are incentives on offer. A railway employee working at the project, for example, is entitled tor extra money equivalent to three to five increments in a single year.
For example, if an Ambala-based railway officer with a basic salary of Rs 90,000 gets an annual increment of Rs 2,700 per month — three per cent of the basic — his counterpart at the Chenab bridge project will receive Rs 8,100 per month as increment — a multiple of three. If the officer is back in a peaceful and non-difficult area in the next posting, he will, however, lose the extra amount.
Then there is a mess allowance of Rs 280 per day for officers, and also two pairs of return air tickets for self and family in a year, with certain conditions attached to the concessions. Also, the officers are allowed to retain their accommodation of the last posting, an incentive offered for those working in Kashmir and the Northeast.
Farmers get employment at bridge construction site
Sitting on a khatiya (bed) outside his home located on the bank of the River Chenab, Shiv Saran Satwal, 90, enjoys fresh air and a picturesque view of a deep gorge surrounded by lush hills.
When his ancestors from Jalandhar acquired a tract of land in Kauri village in Jammu's Reasi district about 100 years ago, little would they have anticipated that the world's tallest railway bridge would come up on their land. Satwal claims that a large tract of land acquired by the railways for constructing the Chenab bridge and Salal B station actually belonged to his family.
No one in the family wished to comment on the exact compensation. Satwal's grandson Sohan Singh showed this writer five independent houses belonging to Satwal's five sons — one a double-storey bungalow and another in the midst of a hillock.
In his youth, Satwal used to rear sheep. But he decided to send his children to schools located in Arnas, a 20-km walk on hilly lanes; one of his sons is now a schoolteacher and another a road contractor.
"The people earlier had to go all the way to Jammu and Karta looking for work. Now, the work has come to our doorstep, thanks to this project," says Sohan Singh, 30, one of the grandsons of Satwal, who has been engaged in the project as a driver.
But Satwal and many others in the villages talk about the removal of Article 370, a provision in the Indian Constitution that gives special autonomy to J&K, arguing that it's the biggest bottleneck for the lack of appreciation of their land value.
"Big companies would have come and bought land here for building hotels and resorts. But we can't monetise our land because of Article 370," Sohan laments. The only sigh of relief though is that the village, despite being located
just 60 km from the LoC, has largely succeeded in isolating itself from militancy of late, the last stray instances of such intrusions being in neighbouring villages in the past.
....Continued to next post
In about two years from now, the two sides of the River Chenab will be joined by a humungous steel bridge, being constructed with 24,370 tonnes of steel at a height of 359 m above the riverbed.
Young Darshan and other baarati from Salal village spent the night at the bride's home only to return the next morning. Darshan later made many such trips without making any fuss about the lack of roads and bridges. He knows that geography has never been kind to the people in Salal, Bakkal, Kauri, Kanthan and other neighbouring villages in Jammu and Kashmir's Reasi district, about 100 km north of Jammu.
But winds of change may be beginning to blow. In about two years from now, the two sides of the River Chenab will be joined by a humungous steel bridge, being constructed with 24,370 tonnes of steel at a height of 359 m above the riverbed.
Once constructed, this Rs 1,198 crore bridge will be the tallest railway bridge in the world, surpassing the record held by the Beipan river Shuibai railway bridge (at 275 m height) in China's Guizhou province.
The 1.315-km-long bridge awarded in 2004 has missed many deadlines along the way; the first D-day of February 2007 went by because of non-consensus on alignment, delay in finalisation of designs and court cases. The reset target date: August 2018.
"It's a bridge that won't merely connect us with our relatives. It's a bridge of hope that will narrow the gap between Jammu and the Kashmir Valley," says Darshan, touching upon the divide that exists between the Jammu region and the Valley, something that only exacerbated after Hizbul commander Burhan Wani was killed by security forces in an encounter on July 8.
Like most other parts of the Kashmir Valley, protesters and stone-pelters targeted sections of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link, forcing the Northern Railways to temporarily suspend train services on the 136-km Banihal-Baramulla stretch, which includes stations such Srinagar, Pampore and Anantnag. Till train services were suspended, as many as 10 pairs of passenger trains were running on a single day, with overwhelming response from the people.
Terror-Proof To be sure, there has been apprehension from day one that the signature Chenab bridge, just 60 km from the LoC with Pakistan, could be a potential target for terrorists, and even the possibility of aerial att vacks was factored in.
The engineers building the bridge claim that this will be India's first railway bridge that has in-built antiterror features. After consulting with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the bridge has been designed in a way that even if one of the 17 piers is blown up, it won't result in the bridge collapsing. Further, the deck of the bridge can take a blast load of a specified trinitrotoluene (TNT), and even if a blast of two and a half times that load takes places 20 m away from the bridge, what it will need are just some repairs.
ET Magazine withholds the information on the exact amount of blast load the Chenab bridge can take for obvious security reasons.
Yes, it's a preparation for future, but the reality today is that Kashmiri militants have not disturbed the construction of the rail line both in Jammu and the Valley. "No extremist group has targeted our Kashmir project. There has not been a single case of killing or kidnapping of persons involved in this project.
Extremists too know it's a pro-people project," says Anurag Sachan, chief administrative officer of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link project.
The idea of laying rail tracks in Kashmir goes way back to 1892. King of Kashmir Maharaja Pratap Singh laid a foundation of a rail link between Jammu and Srinagar, a project finally abandoned only in 1925 when the Maharaja died. It was the time when rail lines were also built between Wazirabad (now in Pakistan) and Jammu, mainly to facilitate the sugar trade. That line was discontinued after Partition in 1947.
Post-Independence, there were stray attempts to build rail lines in Jammu and Kashmir. For example, the Kathua-Jammu rail link was the first to be opened back in 1972.
In 1981, the Jammu-Udhampur rail link was sanctioned and, 13 years later, it was announced — when PV Narasimha Rao was prime minister — that the rail line would be extended to Srinagar; work, however, began only during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's regime between 1998 and 2004.
Bridging the Gaps Once completed, the link will be a 326-km rail line from Jammu to Baramulla. After the 54-km Jammu-Udhampur section was launched in 2005, the then UPA government decided to name the remaining 272-km stretch as the Udhampur- Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link project. Till now, lines at both the ends — 136 km between Banihal and Baramulla in Kashmir Valley and 80 km between Jammu and Katra — are fully operational, with only the 111-km stretch between Katra and Banihal left to be constructed.
But this Katra to Banihal missing link is no engineering cakewalk. The alignment, which was challenged by none other than railway veteran and former Delhi Metro chief E Sreedharan, passes through 27 tunnels across 97 km, the longest being the 12.75 km Tunnel-49. And the total length of the 37 bridges, including the high bridge over the Chenab, is over 7 km. In other words, trains will eventually run either inside a tunnel or on a bridge across 104 km, or 94% of the section.
During the British era, India witnessed construction of two major hill rail lines — one in Shimla and the other in Darjeeling. But both were designed for running what's called "toy trains" (narrow gauge) with a speed of 10 to 15 km per hour. The Katra-Banihal section has been designed for speeds up to 100 km per hour.
Sreedharan, who was part of an expert committee looking into the safety of the line, proposed a direct route through long tunnels, cutting across fault zones and thereby reducing the overall length of the line.
He wanted the Chenab bridge to be constructed at a lower height before taking the line steeply up, something the Railway Board was not comfortable with. In 2013, Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan on behalf of the Centre for Public Interest Litigation filed a public interest litigation, asking for a review of the entire alignment for the Katra-Banihal link with an appeal to the court to direct the Central Vigilance Commission to inquire into the financial losses, wastages and the conduct of the ministry of railways as identified by a CAG report.
The Railway Board summarily rejected the idea of a new alignment, claiming that the existing alignment is "a well-researched, well-investigated line where work is progressing successfully without any mishaps or problems" and then calling the new alignment as advocated by Sreedharan as only a "paper alignment". Early this year, the Delhi High Court disposed of the case and the Supreme Court last month refused to entertain an appeal. "We have no bottleneck now (after the court case). It's a pro-people project.
Our alignment took into consideration the benefit to the maximum inhabitants. Thanks to this project, 200 km new roads were also built. We now need to finish the project on time," says Sachan.
The big question, though, is: After shifting the goalpost several times earlier, will the railways be finally able to close the project before the 2019 Lok Sabha poll?
This writer noticed some sense of urgency at the Chenab bridge project site where over 1,300 people were working. "There is a momentum now. People here are working 24x7," says Rashmi Ranjan Mallick, a deputy chief engineer level officer stationed at the project site.
Story of a Railway engineer working at a site far from home
Railway engineer LS Khalsa has been working at the Chenab bridge project site in Kauri village, 115 km north of Jammu, for the last 10 years. He has many a story to tell — how the survey team that spotted the site used ponies and carried food and sleeping bags and spent several nights in villagers' homes, as there was no motorable road leading to the site.
Khalsa with his colleague Md Rashid Mehmood, also an engineer currently monitoring the steel fabrication workshop at the Srinagar end of the bridge, spent a number of years together in a western Bangladesh project where they retrofitted the British-age Jamuna bridge for trains that could run at a speed of 100 km per hour.
Both the engineers had then worked for IRCON, an Indian rail PSU that executed the foreign project. Now, both of them are on deputation to Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd (KRCL) which is overseeing the project and are "happily" sharing accommodation at the Chenab bridge project site, far away from modern city amenities and avenues for recreation.
"Compared with our project in Bangladesh, the Chenab bridge is a very difficult project. Many of the technologies used here are new. And also it's in Kashmir. You leave your family behind and work in this difficult terrain. But extremists have not targeted our rail project at all," says Khalsa. "I sometimes miss a game of cricket," adds Mehmood who was a junior state-level cricket player for Uttar Pradesh and has also played for the Indian Railways.
If officers and employees were willing to take up this project, it's also because there are incentives on offer. A railway employee working at the project, for example, is entitled tor extra money equivalent to three to five increments in a single year.
For example, if an Ambala-based railway officer with a basic salary of Rs 90,000 gets an annual increment of Rs 2,700 per month — three per cent of the basic — his counterpart at the Chenab bridge project will receive Rs 8,100 per month as increment — a multiple of three. If the officer is back in a peaceful and non-difficult area in the next posting, he will, however, lose the extra amount.
Then there is a mess allowance of Rs 280 per day for officers, and also two pairs of return air tickets for self and family in a year, with certain conditions attached to the concessions. Also, the officers are allowed to retain their accommodation of the last posting, an incentive offered for those working in Kashmir and the Northeast.
Farmers get employment at bridge construction site
Sitting on a khatiya (bed) outside his home located on the bank of the River Chenab, Shiv Saran Satwal, 90, enjoys fresh air and a picturesque view of a deep gorge surrounded by lush hills.
When his ancestors from Jalandhar acquired a tract of land in Kauri village in Jammu's Reasi district about 100 years ago, little would they have anticipated that the world's tallest railway bridge would come up on their land. Satwal claims that a large tract of land acquired by the railways for constructing the Chenab bridge and Salal B station actually belonged to his family.
No one in the family wished to comment on the exact compensation. Satwal's grandson Sohan Singh showed this writer five independent houses belonging to Satwal's five sons — one a double-storey bungalow and another in the midst of a hillock.
In his youth, Satwal used to rear sheep. But he decided to send his children to schools located in Arnas, a 20-km walk on hilly lanes; one of his sons is now a schoolteacher and another a road contractor.
"The people earlier had to go all the way to Jammu and Karta looking for work. Now, the work has come to our doorstep, thanks to this project," says Sohan Singh, 30, one of the grandsons of Satwal, who has been engaged in the project as a driver.
But Satwal and many others in the villages talk about the removal of Article 370, a provision in the Indian Constitution that gives special autonomy to J&K, arguing that it's the biggest bottleneck for the lack of appreciation of their land value.
"Big companies would have come and bought land here for building hotels and resorts. But we can't monetise our land because of Article 370," Sohan laments. The only sigh of relief though is that the village, despite being located
just 60 km from the LoC, has largely succeeded in isolating itself from militancy of late, the last stray instances of such intrusions being in neighbouring villages in the past.
....Continued to next post
Last edited:
. Would have loved to experience the new railway line, it's not more then a 45 km journey but those tunnels and rail bridges looked majestic.
