Minister gets VS stick, says expressway plan on

Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan today downsized his Public Works Minister PJ Joseph, making him eat the humble pie...

Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan today downsized his Public Works Minister PJ Joseph, making him eat the humble pie and beg the Speaker to modify his response to a starred question in the Assembly saying the government was still considering Kerala’s biggest ever highway project that VS himself had got torpedoed while in the Opposition.

In what appeared to be an apparent rethink, Joseph had, by evening, reneged on the Left’s declared posture to tell the state Assembly that the government was still considering the Express Highway project, Kerala’s jinxed Rs 6400 crore ambition modelled on the Malaysian and Chinese Expressways.

Earlier, Joseph had told the Assembly that the project was lying stalled after the groundwork got over, only because of opposition from ‘‘various quarters’’. Sources say that by evening, after the Assembly session got over, a livid VS had hauled up Joseph and asked him to retract. Joseph rushed to the Speaker’s office and tendered a request for ‘‘correcting’’ his reply so that it would read the project ‘‘was being’’ considered, and not ‘‘is’’.

The question, incidentally, was: Is the Express Highway project still under Government consideration? Anyway, the chief among the ‘‘quarters’’ Joseph mentioned to have been opposing the project were Achuthanandan and a slew of Left activists who raised a ruckus after the last Congress-led government had asked an agency to do the spadework for the highway, and forced its shelving. Their objections, over many time spans, had ranged from the environmental (‘‘it would be built over a lot of paddy fields’’) to the socio-economic (‘‘There’s no way those evicted will be rehabilitated’’)to the cultural (‘‘a big wide road right through the middle of Kerala will divide the population into two halves’’) to even one argument that the state should try getting the Centre to sanction high speed trains useful for the common man, rather than an expressway for the rich zooming off in big powerful cars.

The ambitious idea — an access controlled, 100-metre wide high speed corridor stretching the entire 503 km of the state — is expected to cut down travel time from Kasargod in its north to Thiruvananthapuram in south from the current 13 hours to just 5 hours, and would have only 19 interchange points for entry and exit. The interchanges are to house development centres for tourism, IT, biotechnology, and marketing and warehousing spaces. Besides, gas, power cables, irrigation canals — and even a bullet train — have been provisioned to pass through the express highway.

It would pass through 890 hectares of farmland, 2,900 hectares of plantations and 238 hectares of households — some 3,000 families would need to be rehabilitated, and the costs have been worked into the projections.