chennai the railway board rb recently shelved 13 new railway line construction projects worth rs 9500 crore in tamil nadu after carrying out an initial preliminary engineering and traffic survey pets the projects include a 10year proposal to construct a new line between chennai and sriperumbudur through saidapet and a connection between kancheepuram and katpadi through tiruvannamalaithe other projects are a new line between madurai and karaikudi via melur thanjavurpudukottai and kumbakonamvridhachalam via jayankondam which were surveyed with an eye to improve the rail connectivity in the central and southern districts of the state all surveys were done between 20122016 the official reason given by the railway board for not implementing these projects is that they are unremunerative and there is already a large shelf of ongoing projectsfor instance except two projects in the list all others have a negative rate of return ror which means that railways will lose money by operating passenger trains on the routerailways earns money through freight traffic which has low potential in tamil nadu due to lack of extensive mineral resources or high industrialisation like in other states say officialshowever highly placed sources in southern railway say that ror might not be the only reason given that every new railway project in tamil nadu has a negative ror this includes the trivandrumkanyakumari doubling project which was cleared by the cabinet recently the project has a ror of 2railway board rules state that only those projects should be sanctioned which have a ror of 14but by that logic no project will give returns socioeconomic factors should be considered when projects are executed also railways is losing out passenger and freight traffic to roads which are developing at a faster rate said abraham jacob former chief operations manager com of sr and additional member of rbincidentally the chennaisriperumbudur project was envisaged when jacob was com and he had planned to capture the freight traffic from automobile industries in the sriperumbudurkancheepuram belt as well as create a double line through the saidapetkoyambedu stretchthe line now cannot be executed as it has been used by tamil nadu government to build broad highways jacob says due to this traffic from railways both passenger and freight is moving towards roads despite higher coststhis is an example of how lack of support from the state government has resulted in a railway project not taking off says jacob senior railway officials echoed this stating that rb will greenlight unremunerative projects only if the state pumps in half the project cost and also helps in land acquisitiontn is yet to sign a mou with railways to share project costs despite multiple reminders said a senior railway official