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The construction of the long-awaited railway line connecting Chandigarh to the industrial town of Badi in Himachal Pradesh is in full swing.
Having a financial outlay of ₹1,540 million euros, the project to lay a 30.29 km wide gauge railway was started in early August with a deadline of June 2025.
The rail line will connect Chandigarh with the Baddi-Amritsar-Kolkata corridor, filling the Baddi-Barotivala-Nalagarh (BBN) industrial belt in Himachal Pradesh’s Solan district, Asia’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturing hub.
At least seven million people who live and work in medical units here have been waiting for a rail project since the industry started opening up here in the early 2000s.
Officials from the Northern Railway headquarters said that the tender for execution of civil infrastructure works on the Himachal side was floated on April 14 and awarded to Singla Constructions Limited, Chandigarh, on July 21.
The tender for other works such as Railway Overhead Equipment (OHE) and Signal and Telecommunication (SnT) was floated in September and for Chandimandir yard redevelopment construction work in October, but both are still under evaluation by the respective commissions and are yet to be assigned to any company.
It will cover 30 villages
The railway line will have one station at Nanakpur and cover a total of 30 villages, including 21 in Haryana’s Panchkula, a railway spokesperson said.
Sanctioned in 2007-08, the project ran into hurdles for several reasons, primarily those related to land acquisition. To overcome these roadblocks, the railways granted it the status of “Special Railway Project” under the Railways Act, 2008 on 20 June 2019.
Hoping that the project would be completed within the stipulated time, State President of Himachal Drug Manufacturers Association, Dr Rajesh Gupta, said the reliance of the pharmaceutical industry in Baddi/BBN area on road transport would be reduced with the new rail link.
“Many employees here travel to work from other cities. Once the rail link is established, their daily dependence on cars and other transport options will reduce,” he said.
According to Gupta, there are around 350 cosmetics and drug formulation units in the BBN region, with an estimated annual turnover of ₹30,000 crowns, domestic and international.
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