Kerala high speed rail corridor project within 5 years

Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy announced that the big budget high spped rail project is expected to be completed within 5 years. This proposed project will connect Trivandrum to Kasaragod and Mangalore. He made this announcement in his address at Suminfra's 2011's special session on Kerala organised by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at Hyderabad. He also informed that the Delhi Metro Rail Corp has completed the pre- feasibility study on the proposed 550 KM rail and noe they are working on the project model

The high-speed corridor would have two parallel tracks in the standard gauge system as is the case with Delhi Metro Rail. The budget required for this proposed project is estimated to be 77,000 crores. The Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation has been assigned as the nodal agency for this project and Delhi metro Rail has already completed the pre-feasibility study of the project. The width of the land required to be acquired for the rail corridor is 13 metres. The high speed corridor will use a greenfield route to keep the rehabilitation task to the minimum. The project would be completed as a joint venture between the Kerala government and a suitable private partner. T Balakrishnan, additional chief secretary (Industry and Commerce), Alkesh Kumar Sharma, managing director, KSIDC, and TP Thomas Kutty, executive director, KSIDC, are the first directors of the new company. Chief Minister had discussed the same issue with the Union Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi during the meeting that was conducted for the development of railway in Kerala. Dinesh Trivedi had told that this huge budget project requires some private partnership and would be completed as a public- private venture. C M will discuss the same with the other union ministers in his trip to Delhi to discuss the development issues in Kerala.

This high speed rail project has to be completed as soon as possible since the current railway network in the state is very busy as traffic is high. The traffic will increase once the International Container Transshipment Terminal at Vallarpadam is in full swing. So it is necessary to complete this project to allow the easy movement of the containers from Vallarpadam.