Indian Oil Corporation Depot was set up in sixties at its present site in Jammu city. Then it was a deserted place. Then there was laid the railway track to Jammu, passing within one hundred meters from the Depot. For last fifty years the authorities of IOC and district administration kept sleeping over the future prospect of the Jammu Depot knowing that the area was developing for residential colony on the one hand and on the other the strategic Jammu railway station was coming up. They should have looked for a suitable site, spacious enough and close to the railway track and shifted the Depot without asking for it.
Five years have passed and the search for suitable alternate site for the IOC Depot is not materializing. The Divisional Commissioner as well as the Deputy Commissioner are frantically trying to find a suitable site to which the IOC would shift and thus vacate the space for the expansion of Jammu railway station. The Revenue Department, entrusted with the task, made search but found that wherever a site was identified the local populace threatened to come out in mass protest against the possible threat to their lives from the oil depot. Government would not run the risk of alienating the people. It is caught between the devil and the deep sea. It is a strange sequence of corollaries: for expanding the railway station, land is needed and for security reasons the IOC Depot so close to the railway station needs to be shifted elsewhere. For acquiring the land for a new depot some genuine conditions are to be met like closeness to the railway track, away from civilian habitation, away from residential colony and protected against possible natural calamity like floods and earthquake etc. It is difficult to meet all these conditions and no compromise is possible.
The railway station at Jammu is small, congested, squeezing and highly inconvenient to rail passengers. It has to be expanded. This is a priority. Yet another stakeholder in the matter is the Defence Ministry, which has raised objection to the shifting of the depot to Barian in Samba on the ground of it closeness to the border. The option of Pargalta, as the new site of the IOC Depot has been challenged by the locals as hazardous to health. Having met with no success in two trials stated above, the IOC is reported to be focusing on Jammu-Udhampur rail track so that a new site in close proximity of this track could be earmarked for the new IOC Jammu headquarters. How soon will that mature is anybody’s guess?
Landowners are objecting everywhere in the country whenever the Government wants to acquire land. It seems that Land Acquisition Act is getting trivialized and politicians are caring more for their respective constituencies and less for the mega developmental schemes planned by the Government. How long will this see-saw drama between the politicians and the land-holders continue. Development of the country in major sectors like energy and transport cannot be left to the whims of the people. Consider the dangerous level of threat to civilian life by allowing the present Depot to continue where it is. Consider the urgency of expanding, streamlining and modernizing the railway station of Jammu which is required to handle crores of people round the year. We like to warn the railway authorities that Jammu railway station has to be the biggest and the most attractive railway station in India with ultramodern and state- of- at facilities for passenger and good handling. It has to have imposing railway hotel and restaurant and private catering services and boarding and lodging arrangement. It has to have escalators from up the platform down to the connecting road. The entry to the railway station encroached upon by vendors has to be vacated and made at least 100 feet vide.
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