Title - India has lost a derailment-free railway technology, says former MD of Konkan Railway

The 1.6-km-long test track structure, built at a cost of Rs 50 crore, placed at about 10 m above the ground at Madgaon in Goa has two air-conditioned coaches, which would also be dismantled sold off.

With the Konkan Railway deciding to dismantle the sky-bus test rack and sold it off as scrap, B Rajaram, former Konkan Railway Managing Director and the inventor of the project said that with this decision India had lost the technology for a derailment-free railway.

“Any other nation would have grabbed the opportunity to be a tough competitor in lucrative metro transport business. In fact it happened to be Prime Minister Malaysia who wrote a personally addressed letter to our respected PM in 2007, offering Rs.2000 cr of their funds as investment, (not loan), to build Skybus in Hyderabad, the city of the inventor, as he mentions!! The Malaysia leadership owned up Skybus as SE Asia initiative and took pride. But India thinks different! It will be the loss of people of India,” says Rajaram.

“Skybus was the result of a shared dream with so many engineers and technicians of India , spread over all industries, and proven to norms of industry standards, and safer than all metros in the world, as well as economically viable, true technology breakthrough in urban transportation,” he said.

“Technical bodies like American Society of Engineers , World Intellectual Property Office Geneva, as well as tough examinations by US and other nations’ patent offices agreed as novel invention and made it part of human achievement and permanently placed on Proceedings and patent records. National Geographic as well as Discovery granted rare honour for the work done by our country.Honest scientists like Abdul Kalam, Anil Kakodkar praised and upheld. Independent BARC and RDSO testing proved the technical parameters,” he said.

“Skybus happened to be the result of my own inspiration taken from the high thinking and simple living leaders of independence struggle. I wanted to show the collective intelligence and technical prowess of even small scale industries, which can produce a new railway technology, world class competition in terms of financially viable , technically much superior to existing railway system, making it derailment-free railway,” he added.

The 1.6-km-long test track structure, built at a cost of Rs 50 crore, placed at about 10 m above the ground at Madgaon in Goa has two air-conditioned coaches, which would also be dismantled sold off. The decision was taken at a recent Konkan Railway board meeting. The Konkan Railway invited global expression of interest for the project twice but did not get any favourable response,

The Skybus project, first-of-its-kind in India, is a modified rail with overhead tracks on the underside of a concrete structure at a height of about 10 m from the ground. The concrete lane is supported by columns rising from the central verge of existing roads.