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This newspaper had been focussed on highlighting hurdles against development of air and train travel in Dimapur, the gateway of Nagaland since the past decades with the objective of educating the people so that the state government can intervene to improve the situation. As far as train services are involved, the fact is an established fact that Dimapur Railway Station nets the second highest revenue for the North Frontier Railway in the entire north east after Guwahati. Having said this about the neglect of Dimapur railway station; perhaps the other equally crucial point pertains to the problems faced by the NFR in Dimapur on the issue of land encroachment. Unless the land is freed of encroachment, it will not be possible to build passenger amenities and other facilities. It is a fact that the station has been deprived of its due share in terms of development of passenger amenities and better connectivity because of the problems created by encroachments and unauthorised constructions. These have created hurdles leading to very negligible progress for development of adequate and commensurate facilities for passengers. This was evident by the series of reports carried out by Nagaland Post during the past decades. The strange sight in Dimapur railway station is the existence of at least ten mandirs by count which have come up on r railway land. The point is what has been the compelling reason to accord construction of mandirs as a priority instead of ensuring that railway lands are utilised purely for the purposes of providing services to the people? Besides the religious encroachers, there are also some professional ones who either set up rest houses over religious sites or make shift stalls, which are later sought to be legitimised on the specious plea of ‘right of occupation’ flaw in the law. According to railway sources, the local authorities have favoured the unauthorised settlements by issuing permits even if they cannot do so without clearance from the railways. It has been clearly stated by the Divisional Railway Manager (Lumding) that instead of playing its role as custodian of the law, the local administration instead, has been dragging its feet in conducting a joint eviction drive. The railway authorities have alleged that a long drawn court battle pertaining to land encroachment has turned out to be a major bottleneck and halted railway authorities from widening platform number 2 at Dimapur Railway station and construction of a roof over it. Till today, after so many decades, the particular platform has no roof. Passengers entraining of detraining on this platform are subjected to the vicissitudes of weather. On the other hand, a particular religious structure that was constructed some 70 years ago and probably permitted by the railways purely for performing pujas, is slowly being expanded and over which an upper storey is coming up. The ongoing construction once completed, could be used as transit camp for those who belong to the same community. The state government has to take serious note of the alleged encroachment and also demand clear answers as to the questionable manner in which railway land was given for construction of religious places. Railways, like airlines and bus terminuses are for use of travelling public and where religion should not be extended exceptions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Encroachment with religious garb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}