THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A majority of people have voted against SilverLine in the largest survey of public opinion on the government's ambitious semi high-speed rail project.
75.29 percent of the respondents in the survey organised by Edupress research agency and Greens Movement Kerala said they did not favour the project citing environmental damage, high ticket charges and public debt.
The first-ever large scale polling on SilverLine elicited the views of 13,704 persons. The huge sample was representative of gender and different education profiles. It covered people of all districts and even non-resident Keralites. While 20.41% of the participants welcomed the project, 4.3% did not have an opinion. Interestingly, 76% of the audience wanted a betterment of the existing rail service in the state. 75% polled for increasing the speed of train services in the state.
69% of the audience had travelled in the Thiruvananthapuram-Kasaragod route at least once. 64% of them were not frequent travellers.
Most of the participants were educated, falling in the middle age group. 36% of them were degree holders, 14% had technical education and 23% were post-graduates. As many as 11,402 persons answered all questions and 2302 did not answer all questions. 44.91% of them were women and 54.52% were men. Though the names of the participants were not asked, 983 persons voluntarily disclosed it.
"This is only a pilot survey but it reflects the public opinion on Silverline line. As the finally obtained sample crossed 14000, it's a critical size and average of 1000 in a district. A sizable number of people did not respond to questionnaires or returned them by skipping vital information. It means that they are yet to make a decision on SilverLine. To the open-end comment request, responses were stunning," said S Georgekutty, founder-director of Edupress who led the survey.
13.68% of the respondents belonged to the low-income group, 81.28% to the middle-income group and 5.04% were from the high-income group. Of the participants, 11.7% had government jobs and 32.6% were employed in the private sector. Pensioners constituted 19.8 pc, daily wagers 8.3 pc, unemployed 7.4 pc, students 5.1 pc, self-employed 9.5 pc and public workers 5.6 pc.
Earlier, before preparing the DPR, K-Rail did a pilot survey with a sample size of 700 spread over 10 districts covered by SilverLine.