DHAKA, Bangladesh (CU)_ As part of Bangladesh’s golden jubilee independence celebrations, the passenger train between India’s New Jalpaiguri (NJP) in West Bengal and Dhaka will commence on March 26. As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is flying to Dhaka on March 26 for the celebrations, it is expected that the Indian PM and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will flag off the new train service in an attempt to revive the rail networking between the countries that was in operation until 1965.
According to the reports from our New Delhi correspondent, the operation of the non-stop ten-bogey train between NJP and Dhaka will cover a distance of 513 km. A team of Bangladesh Railway officers and Ravinder Kumar Verma, Divisional Railway Manager of India’s Katihar Division, discussed about the railway service between the two countries at a two-day meeting in New Jalpaiguri on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Wednesday, in Siliguri, Mohammed Shahidul Islam, the Divisional Railway Manager of Paksey Division who headed the Bangladesh Railway officer team, told the media that Bangladesh wanted to operate the train between Siliguri and Dhaka. He said: “But Siliguri didn’t have the required infrastructure, so it had to be NJP instead”.
In the northern part of West Bengal, NJP has the largest railway station and is only 6 km away from Siliguri. It is a main junction between mainland India and north-eastern India. The Dhaka-NJP train will also use the same rail route as that of the Haldibari-Chilahati train which was flagged off last year. Verma said that the name of the Dhaka-NJP train and its cost will be decided soon.
It was said that at NJP and Dhaka railway stations, custom and immigration facilities will be provided, and the train will operate from NJP on Thursdays and Fridays and from Dhaka on Fridays and Tuesdays. Islam said: “In the next phase, we will connect Nepal and Bhutan.” He added, “With the Partition in 1947, railway connectivity between these two stations had been severed. People of both the countries suffered a lot of connectivity issues and wanted this route to be revived.”
