Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Nepalese counterpart Pushpakamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ will virtually inaugurate Uttar Pradesh’s first land port along the India-Nepal border today.
Spread over 115 acres, the Rupaidiha land port in Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh has been developed with a budget of Rs 206 crore to promote cross-border trade with Nepal.
The Rupaidiha border is a significant trade route, with annual trade worth Rs 8,500 crore between India and Nepal. Exports account for 95 per cent of the trade value, making the facility’s development an important move.
The volume of trade is expected to go up significantly as it is estimated that the number of trucks passing through the land port will increase to at least 300 daily from the current 200.
Land Port
Owing to its central geographical location, India shares over 15,000 km long international land border with seven countries in South Asia, namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.
There are several designated entry and exit points for cross-border movement of persons, goods and vehicles. For several years, inadequate infrastructure at designated border checkpoints has often been one of the major hindrances to regional trade, impeding the movement of both goods and passenger moving in and out of neighbouring countries.
Crossing the borders has been a costly affair — the borders have been a barrier to freedom of movement of trade and transportation.
It was in 2012, when India opted for a reform by setting up the Land Ports Authority of India (LPAI) as a statutory body under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) under the Land Ports Authority of India Act, 2010.
The concept of land port as officially acknowledged in India is: ‘Land port’ means an area on the international borders of India including portions of national, State highways and other roads, notified as land Customs station or immigration check-post under the Customs Act, 1962 (52 of 1962) or the Foreigners’ Act, 1946 (31 of 1946), and includes railways, with facilities for clearance and transport of passengers and goods across the borders of India.
Put simply, a land port is a “one-stop shop”, housing various facilities, including customs, immigration, border security and provide complete state-of-the art infrastructure facilities such as warehouses, examination sheds, weighbridges etc. for cross border movement of passengers and goods at designated locations along India’s international border.
The first land port developed and operationalised in 2012 by LPAI was at Attari, Punjab, on a traditional route between India and Pakistan.
Four International Borders
There are currently 10 land Ports operational along land borders with Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
These are Attari and Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab — handing India’s trade with Pakistan; Raxaul and Jogbani in Bihar — handling India’s trade with Nepal; and Moreh in Manipur — handling India’s trade with Myanmar.
Inaugurated in 2019, the land Port at Dera Baba Nanak is intended to facilitate Indian pilgrims visit the Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan.
There are five land port along Indo-Bangladesh Border – Agartala and Srimantapur in Tripura, Dawki in Meghalaya, Petrapole in West Bengal and Sutarkandi in Assam.
The largest land Port in South Asia, Land port Petrapole is located at a distance of about 80 kms from Kolkata and handles nearly 30 percent of land-based trade between India and Bangladesh. Operational since February 2016, the land port has been witnessing an increasing number of passenger movement with an average of 22 lakh people crossing the post on either side annually.
Several new Ports are coming up to further improve the cross-border trade.
These include Banbasa in Uttarakhand, Sonauli in Uttar Pradesh and Bhithamore in Bihar on the India-Nepal border; Sabroom in Tripura, Kawrpuichhuah in Mizoram and Fulbari in West Bengal along the international border between India and Bangladesh.
Boosting Trade
Since the inception of the first port in Attari in 2012, LPAI has facilitated cross-border trade worth more than Rs 5 lakh crore across all its operational ports.
In the financial year (FY) 2021-22, total bilateral trade of Rs. 77,527.99 Crore took place via land ports which is 59 per cent more than Rs 48,682.76 crore trade recorded during FY 2020-21.
These land ports have also played an instrumental role in creating a truly seamless passenger experience by facilitating cross-border passenger movement of over 1.5 crore people.
In the financial year 2021-22 the passenger movement through land ports increased by more than 62 per cent over the last financial year. A total of 401,536 passengers moved through the land ports in FY 2021-22 as compared to 246,688 passenger movement in FY 2020-21.
The land ports in India have proven to be instrumental in channelising informal trade to formal trade and is a boon for regional economic integration.
A Decade On The Rails: Comparing Train Safety In UPA Vs NDA
The devastating multi-train collision on 2 June in Odisha’s Balasore district, which claimed 275 lives and left more than 1,000 injured, as usual, snowballed into a political slugfest, with demands made for resignation of Union Rail Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
The rail accident, being described as one of the worst in recent times, has reignited the old debate regarding whether the Narendra Modi-led NDA (2014-23) fared better than Manmohan Singh’s UPA (2004-2014) on the count of railway safety.
Let us look at the facts first. For comparison, we have used the accident statistics from 2004-05 to 2013-14 as the reference for the UPA and the statistics between 2014-15 up to 2022-23 as the baseline for the NDA.
Total Accidents
From 2004-05, when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), formed the government in the Centre, until 2014, when it demitted office, a total of 1,711 accident took place. As compared to this, from 2014 to March 2023, when BJP-led NDA occupied the centre-stage, the railways recorded a total of 638 accidents.
On the basis of the number of incidence of train accidents per million train kms, while the UPA-era saw it decrease from 0.29 in 2004-05 to 0.10 in 2013-14, during the current NDA-rule, it has reduced from 0.11 in 2014-15 to 0.037 in March 2023.
Railway train accidents (consequential) includes collision, derailment, fire, level crossing accidents and other miscellaneous accidents. While calculating the casualty due to a train accident, the number of persons killed are taken into account.
The casualty is further categorised into death of railway passenger, railway staff and others. The railways does not count run over deaths as deaths in railway accidents.
The number of accidents dropped sharply by 49 per cent from 234 during 2004-05 to 118 in 2013-14. A similar pattern has emerged during the NDA- coalition with the number of accidents dropping by a whopping 64 per cent from 135 in 2014-15 to 48 in March 2023.
While 2,453 lives were lost and 4,486 injured in all train accidents recorded in the UPA era, the NDA-rule has witnessed 781 deaths and 1,543 injuries.
For both the coalition governments, train derailment formed the biggest chunk of all rail accidents, with 867 train derailments reported during the UPA-rule compared to the 426 in the NDA-dispensation.
One-To-One
The BJP-led government has done convincingly better if a variable-to-variable comparison is made between the two governments. However, they seem to be almost even in terms of number of successes achieved during their rule.
The only caveat is that the train operation was heavily curtailed during 2020-21 due to Covid-related travel restrictions.
The Indian Railway (IR) is one of the world’s largest railways. It acts as a vertically integrated organisation providing passenger and freight services. It is a single system which consists of 67,956 route km of track that traverse the country.
More than 21,650 number of trains ply on the railway network carrying about 22.15 million passengers and hauling nearly 3.32 million tonnes of freight every day.
Accidents tarnish image and question safe and sound working procedures of the railways. While both the coalition political dispensations have managed to turn the tide and improve the safety, much needs to be done .
The latest tragedy should now force the railways to focus on a fail-safe mechanism to save any further precious human lives from being lost.