Tresspassing into nature

Planned new east-west railroad and Hulaki highway threaten the Chitwan National Park

Bhrikuti Rai and Sunir Pandey in CHITWAN

BIKRAM RAI

When Finance Minister Shankar Koirala presented the annual budget last July, he highlighted “projects of national pride” that he said would be the “lifeline for the economy”.

Besides hydropower and irrigation projects, he unveiled the East-West Electric Railway and the Tarai Hulaki Highway. No one would argue against more efficient mass transit along the Tarai, but the proposed route of the two projects cut through Chitwan National Park, threatening tourism and decades of conservation that has rescued the tiger and rhino from the brink of extinction.

On paper, the idea of upgrading the East-West Highway completed 30 years ago makes sense, since more than half the country’s population now lives in the Tarai and the plains provide easier connectivity than the mountains.

All proposed alignments of the new railway, however, would slice through the sanctuary. Chitwan Valley lies in the Inner Tarai and unlike other parts of southern Nepal, does not have plains bordering India to its south. The national park and its buffer zones therefore lay astride the proposed railroad alignments.

“What will remain of the national park when we have trains passing across the protected areas in 10 years?” rues Chief Warden Kamal Jung Kunwar of Chitwan National Park.

A feasibility study prepared in 2010 for the East-West Railway first took the tracks along the foot of the Someswor Hills near the famous Tiger Tops Resort in Meghauli. But that region is an important corridor for wildlife migration and the national park objected to it, proposing that the railway alignment follow the current Hetauda-Bharatpur road which skirts the park.

“There is no rationale for building a road or railway through one of the world’s most outstanding and successfully operating national parks,” says Hemanta Mishra, Nepal’s foremost tiger and rhino conservationist and architect of the Chitwan National Park in 1973. “A railway line and a road through the park without a comprehensive environmental and social impact assessment would undo 40 years of investment by the government, private sector, and the local community.”

A leaked detailed project report (DPR) prepared by the Department of Railways and obtained by Nepali Times shows various routes have been proposed, all of which cut through the sanctuary (see online). One of the routes involves digging two tunnels 14km and 11km long, but has been abandoned because of cost. The report most favours an alignment that will take the railway south along the Madi to Jagatpur track, across the Narayani in Amarapuri, then south-west across the Chure Hills to Tribeni (see map).