Students Urge PM Modi, Odisha CM To Include Their Villages In Coastal Highway Project

Jagatsinghpur: More than 500 students of 52 schools in Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district have urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to include their villages in the coastal highway project.

The highway project announced by Union Roads and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari in 2015 brought hope for lakhs of people of Balikuda and Erasama blocks, which are prone to natural calamities. Implementation of a new map alignment, however, shifts the highway to about 25 km away from the coastline, leaving those villages vulnerable.

A student of Delhi Public School, Kalinga, Sheetal Mahek Routray, requested the inclusion of villages under Balikuda-Erasama Assembly constituency in the Centre’s ambitious coastal highway project. “They have braved the 1999 super cyclone, which took lives of thousands, devastating the entire geography till date,” Sheetal wrote in the letter and urged PM Modi to construct the highway as per the old plan as it would benefit the locals.

Likewise, another student Asutosh Swain, a Class IV student at Government Primary School at Anantpur in Balikuda, said the coastal highway would not protect his village from tidal waves as it will pass 30 km away.