Railway Land Use Scheme Still Hangs Fire

The scheme of commercial exploitation of the unutilised railway land still remains a non-starter. Railway Bhavan sources said the two proposals which were taken up as pilot projects have so far made no progress at all.

One of these projects was for the construction of a multi-storeyed commercial complex in the vicinity of the Bandra railway station in Mumbai, while the other was for building another multi-storeyed complex near the Bangalore Cantonment station.

The idea was that if mulit-storeyed commercial complexes are built at such major centres, the revenue yield for the government through sub-letting would be tremendous.

The railways may not have to bear the construction cost also as finance would be easily forthcoming by way of advances from the parties interested in hiring the space. But sources disclosed that the proposal is still shuttling between the ministry of the urban affairs and employment matter, and the fin required to formulate the guidelines and then these were to be cleared by the finance ministry.

All the progress so far in the matter is that the urban ministry made some guidelines and sent to the finance ministry which made some changes and referred it back to the urban affairs ministry which again revised the rules and again sent it back to the finance and thus the sea-saw game is continuing.

Railways has broadly two kinds of lands, one in urban areas including those in major cities, and another in rural areas lying around the stations as along the margin of the railway track. According to the official statistics, only 3.57 lakh hectares of the railway land out of a total of 4.2 lakh hectares is presently under use. The remaining acreage of a huge 0.63 lakh hectares is "vacant" yielding no revenue to the railways. Another aspect of this "vacant" land is that about 2,457 hectares are under encroachments, the largest portion of the encroached land being under:

The Northern Railway (900 hectares), followed by South Eastern Railway ( 715 hectares and Northeast Frontier Railway (304 hectares). The shares of other railways are: North Eastern Railway --115 hectares, Southern Railway -- 83 hectares, South Central Railway -- 84 hectares and Western Railways--107 hectares.

On the other hand, railways is unable to execute its developmental schemes for reasons of fund constraints. A good deal of money can easily be generated if the actual and so called vacant land are made to yield revenues by their commercial exploitation.

This is not an impossible job to do provided the matter is taken up seriously by the railways which, in turn, will take up the issue with the union government and concerned state governments so that the encroachments are removed. The powers for doing this is already there via the Public Premises (eviction of unauthorised occupants) Act, 1971.

Sources were surprised that while the long-pending scheme of commercial exploitation of vacant railway land is still only in the paper-stage, how could the Union railway minister Ram Vilas Paswan take the decision to provide rail connections from international airports to the concerned city centres.