Imphal, March 05: The General Manager NF Railway Vipan Nanda today said the broad gauge railway line will reach till Tupul which is about 53 km from Imphal.

After Tupul it is not possible to construct the railway line.

Every district headquarters will have a railway reservation counter within the next few years.

In phases the works will be taken up.

For the railway project land acquisition works will be started and if there is no interference from the militants the project will be completed within a period of four years he said speaking to the media today.

Inadequate transport system is bottleneck fore the industrial development of the state of Manipur a need was immensely felt to extend the railway network in the state of Manipur and various surveys were undertaken for this purpose from time to time.

The work for construction of new BG line from Diphu to Karong was sanctioned in 1997-98.Accordingly estimate was processed for sanction to Railway Board.

But when work was about to start on April 4, 2000, Govt of Manipur pointed out certain difficulties in construction of the proposed line from Dihu to Karong and requested the Railway to consider the extension of Railway line from Jiribam to Imphal which would involve the State of Manipur only.

Railway Board have frozen the work of Diphu-Karong rail line.

Reconnaissance Engineering cum Traffic survey for a new BG line from Jiribam to Imphal, was done as per instruction of Railway Board in 2001.The area involved in the proposed alignment of new BG line from Jiribam to Imphal has been a difficult hilly terrain with troublesome accessibility and above all prone to insurgency problem prevailing in the state.

Therefore this reconnaissance survey needed some modern technique like photo gram metric survey or digitization of available toposheets of survey of India for creating a digital database to avoid the field survey to a great extent at this stage.

On the basis of that the final alignment has been chosen after exercising three alternatives.

It is proposed to terminate the line at Tupul, a small township by the side of NH-53, which is about 25 km short of Greater Imphal in view of the very steep terrain thereafter.

In fact, Imphal town is situated at an altitude of 790 m above mean sea level whereas the altitude at Jiribam is 40 m above MSL.

Before reaching Imphal from Tupul (altitude 425 m) there exist high hill ranges with altitude varying from 1300 m to 1500 m.So, it is not feasible to extend the proposed alignment beyond Tupul to connect Imphal town.

However Tupul is well connected to Imphal by road system.

The project section Jiribam-Imphal (Tupul) traverses through the district of Imphal East (Jiribam subdivision) for a length of about 18.50 km and remaining 79.40 km falls in Tamenglong district.

In the month of February, 2004 Railway Board communicated that project of new BG line from Jiribam to Imphal (Tupul) have been included in the final supplementary demands for grant during 2003-04 at a cost of Rs 727.56 crores.

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