Good Days are here to begin in Arunachal

According to the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR), 90 percent work on the railway track from Harmutty in Lakhimpur district of Assam to Naharlagun in Arunachal Pradesh has been done & the maiden train will chug in to the country’s easternmost state .

NFR public relations officer Nripendra Bhattacharyya told  that  the train engine was successfully run on the newly laid 20km broad-gauge track between Harmutty & Naharlagun railway stations on an experimental basis.. Bhattacharyya said some work related to signals & construction of platforms remains to be done which is likely to be done within the next couple of months.

The track will be thrown open to trains following an inspection by the commissioner of railway safety, he said.

The check run was conducted in the presence of Papum Pare deputy commissioner Pige Ligu & NFR chief engineers P.P. Bhutia & S.C. Rajak.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had laid the foundation of the project on January 31, 2008.

The work on the railway project started in October 2008 & was originally scheduled to be done by December 2012. The project was delayed because of issues in removing high-tension power lines & obtaining forest clearance. The total cost of the project was around Rs 371 crore.

 But, the pressuring building tactics of the Nabam Tuki  on the Centre  finally paid off .The railway line was a long-pending demand of Arunachal Pradesh, its business community.

According to the NFR, the Harmutty-Naharlagun project was part of the railways plan to bring all the state capitals in the Northeast on the railway map.