MANGALORE: After an eight-year-long wait for a railway overpass on Padil-Bajal Road and repeated representations to authorities not yielding any results, residents under the aegis of Railway Sethuve Horatta Samiti have decided to protest again.

The residents first protested on December 30 by holding up the Mumbai-bound Matysagandha Express for nearly three hours. Terming the stir as a spontaneous reaction to the never-ending miseries due to the level crossing, which is closed for over 11 hours a day on an average, the samiti has now decided to stage a protest in front of Kankanady Railway Station on Wednesday.

B.M. Madhava, president of the samiti told presspersons here on Monday, that residents of the area had submitted memoranda to Railway Ministers from the time of Ram Naik in 1998 demanding an overpass. He said the problem has been compounded as the number of trains passing through the area has increased since then.

Ahmad Bawa, executive committee member, Kanara Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said then Union Railway Minister Nitish Kumar had told the KCCI that number of trains operating on the Konkan Railway route will go up to 57 by 2007. At present, 14 pairing express and passenger trains, goods trains and locomotives operate on this route necessitating closure of road traffic.

Railways' version

While the railway authorities state that the level crossing is closed for an average of 10 minutes to allow these trains and locomotives to pass through, he said calculation by samiti members indicate that they remain closed for nearly 12 to 17 minutes. Given the present traffic on the route, the crossing remains closed for 672 minutes a day.

Assailing Mangalore City Corporation for not following up its proposal to construct an overpass at an estimated cost of Rs. 8.5 crores, Mr. Madhava said authorities are indulging in a game of passing the buck. He said that as a last resort, the Samiti will lay siege to the Corporation office at Lalbagh here if its demands are not met.

Referring to the proposed demonstration on Wednesday, he said members and office-bearers of the Samiti will take out a procession from the railway crossing on Padil-Bajal Road to the nearby Kankanady railway station. Elected representatives including MPs, MLAs and area corporators and authorities concerned have been invited to listen to their grievances, he noted.

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