The Khurda Road–Balangir new railway line was first surveyed on Jan 1, 1947, with the original alignment, largely parallel to the Mahanadi, being planned as a 286-km route with an estimated cost of Rs 4.98 crore and a rate of return (ROR) of (-) 0.28%. Citing poor financial viability, the erstwhile Bengal Nagpur Railway did not recommend construction, as per official sources. Public demand led the Railway Board to conduct a fresh preliminary engineering-cum-traffic survey in 1985–86. The project cost was then estimated at Rs 208.8 crore with an ROR of 1%, but it was again not recommended due to low returns, sources said. On July 8, 1991, the railway ministry announced the project would be shelved. Railway historian Dilip Kumar Samantray said the demand persisted and momentum returned in the early 1990s after the then CM, Biju Patnaik, took interest and Kanhu Charan Lenka became minister of state for railways in the P V Narasimha Rao govt. In March 1993, the railways ordered a reappraisal. Samantray said industrialisation proposals in Odisha during the early 1990s improved traffic projections. The survey report submitted in Sept 1993 estimated the cost at Rs 322.5 crore and projected an ROR of 14.41%, marginally above the 14% viability threshold. The project was sanctioned in 1994–95 with an initial budget provision of Rs 1 crore, but progress remained slow. By 2000, only Rs 18.5 crore had been spent, Samantray said, adding that the industrialisation push weakened by the end of the decade as many proposed projects failed to materialise, prompting the railways to review sanctioned projects in Odisha. “On Nov 11, 2000, the Railway Board ordered another traffic reappraisal survey. In Aug 2003, the South Eastern Railway submitted a reappraisal report for a 289-km broad-gauge line, estimating the cost at Rs 756.74 crore with an ROR of 9.15%,” Samantray said. Prasanna Mishra, who was Odisha’s finance secretary when the project was sanctioned in 1994-95, said, “Budgetary allocations began from 2004–05 with Rs 15.39 crore, rising to Rs 20 crore the next year, but were widely seen as inadequate for a project of this scale. Low annual allocations continued for several years.”Mishra added that the slow pace triggered protests and political pressure across Balangir, Sonepur, Boudh and Nayagarh’s Daspalla, including demonstrations outside the East Coast Railway headquarters in Bhubaneswar. The pace changed after 2014. PM Narendra Modi reviewed the project that year and expressed unhappiness over the slow progress. Work later accelerated on the first 32km stretch from Khurda Road to Begunia. A passenger train was flagged off by the then railway minister, Suresh Prabhu, on July 16, 2015, on the newly built Khurda–Begunia section. On July 20, 2015, the Odisha govt signed an MoU with the railways to share costs in a 50:50 ratio for construction of 177 km of the 289-km project, while the state agreed to provide land free of cost for that section. The railways also began work from the Balangir side to speed up completion, officials said. The project was reviewed at the highest level under PRAGATI in 2020. After Ashwini Vaishnaw became the railway minister, work was taken up on a faster scale. With forest clearance pending for years, the alignment was slightly modified to avoid wildlife and forest areas, taking the final length to 301km, according to official sources. The 75km forest stretch between Daspalla and Purunakatak remained the key bottleneck. It received Stage-I forest clearance in Feb 2023 and Stage-II clearance in Jan 2025.
