From the Telegraph today : Good news for the Heritage Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR)

Tindharia tracks to open soon

Siliguri, Dec. 15: The toy train tracks at Tindharia have been relaid soon and service from Siliguri to Gayabari is set to resume later this month. “We plan to resume the service to Gayabari with a big bang. A special train will be operated from Siliguri Junction till Gayabari (34km) on that day. The date will probably be December 26. The work of relaying tracks at Tindharia has more or less been completed. We plan to conduct a trial run on the newly laid tracks this week,” Arun Kumar Sharma, the divisional railway manager of Katihar division of Northeast Frontier Railway, said over the phone from Katihar today. A landslide at Paglajhora on NH55 in June 2010 disrupted the services from Siliguri to Kurseong. STH has covered this issue extensively earlier - see here Praful Rao, Kalimpong, Dist Darjeeling

Light at the end of the tunnel? : Tindharia/ Pagla Jhora landslides to be repaired soon.

STH has been associated with the Tindharia and Pagla Jhora landslides from Nov2011 when we did a big, well-attended workshop at Tindharia.
Thereafter, in July this year, after further landslides directly threatened the DHR workshop at Tindharia, we spent an entire day in the area checking the drainage and preparing a report for an expert and a friend (see here).
I am glad to say that the PWD will finally be taking up repairs of both the above landslide areas in the near future. You can read the Telegraph article here and this move I am sure, comes directly as an aftermath of the visit to Kolkata by the high powered NDMA team early this week (read here)

My only fear is, that is it too little - too late?

Because the way our bureaucracy groans and grinds along, by the time the work ACTUALLY starts, the monsoons of 2013 will be here and during the rainy season, we all know that major preventive work cannot really be done; all we can do then is fire fighting and emergency crisis management.
The monsoons were mild this year (which poses other problems as regards severe water shortage problems in the Mar-May2013) so we did not have major landslides in our area.

In an age where we should increasingly be expecting the unexpected, aren't we pushing our luck too far to for hope this trend to continue?

Praful Rao