<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There was a sense of jubilation when the Ministry of Civil Aviation(MCA) decided to consider major improvement at Dimapur airport on both infrastructure as well as in enabling it to handle landing and take-off by wide bodied aircrafts such as Airbus and Boeing. The MCA had acted on the inputs from Nagaland Governor R.N. Ravi during his meeting with the minister of civil aviation Hardeep Singh Puri during November 2019. The airport built during the Second World War, became operational for civilian aircrafts in the mid-70s and has since shown a potential for growth. All these past decades, Dimapur airport, which began ferrying civilian air passengers since the mid-70s, has been serving the air travellers of Nagaland, Karbi Anglong and parts of upper Assam. While other airports that began operations much after Dimapur airport have scaled higher in terms of amenities and connectivity, it is not understood as to why the regional authority have meted out a step-motherly treatment to Dimapur airport. The fact that the state government has been inept in stating its case with the MCA is borne by the fact that after several decades of stalemate , the picture changed when Nagaland Governor R.N. Ravi took it up with the MCA last year. Nagaland Governor R.N. Ravi certainly deserves the credit for finally clearing the decks to enable Dimapur airport to play its role for the progress of Nagaland. So much had been written and discussed on the matter, that the state government cannot feign ignorance. It took Ravi just a few months to understand what was needed to be done in order to promote trade and travel which form the nucleus of the state’s development agenda.It is now hoped, that the next important step which the Governor would also hopefully focus is on Dimapur railway station. This newspaper has been reporting and commenting on the crucial need for improving air and rail connectivity since the past few decades. Dimapur Railway Station nets the second highest revenue for the North Frontier Railway in the entire north east after Guwahati. Having said this, it is pertinent to look into factors that have derailed the progress of Dimapur to attain the status its revenue contribution deserves. The NFR has been giving mere lip service for lack of interest in catering to the growing demands for more trains for Dimapur passengers. The mere cosmetic façade of ‘development’ is commendable though the budget was a mere Rs.2 crore when compared to the Rs.5 crore or more for other smaller stations in other states. It is hoped that the Governor will undertake a study about the impediments and hurdles. As reported, Dimapur handles around 4000 to 5000 passengers daily but there are only around 600 seats available. When there are around 40 passenger trains running from Tinsukia-Dibrugarh-Dimapur and Guwahati, it is shocking that as the second highest revenue earner for NFR, only two trains originate at Dimapur: Nagaland Express and Guwahati-Dimapur BG Express. To clear the decks, there is need to clear encroachers from railway land in Dimapur so that NFR will have no more alibis or excuses to not develop the station. Unless the land is freed of encroachment, it will not be possible to build passenger amenities and have additional train facilities. In this regard, the public, especially the train travellers will hope that the Governor will do the needful.<\/p>\n
Development back on track<\/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-208647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208647","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=208647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}