Tripura chief minister hails rail budget

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar on Wednesday welcomed the railway budget as it provided many sops for the northeastern states.

"Railway minister fulfilled our long standing demand to connect Tripura's southernmost sub-divisional town of Sabroom by a railway line," Sarkar told IANS over phone from New Delhi.

He said: "If the Indian railway extends its line up to Sabroom, it will be very easy to connect Chittagong, which is just 75 km from the town."

Chittagong is the southeastern commercial town and an international port in Bangladesh.

After extending the railway line up to Sabroom, 175 km from the state capital, Tripura and the entire northeast would be linked with South-East Asia, Sarkar said.

Tripura has only 67 km of rail tracks and the Northeast Frontier Railway is laying a new line to connect the rail network to the state capital Agartala within this year.

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Centre wants to find honourable settlement to Naga problem: PM

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said the UPA government would succeed in its efforts to find an honourable settlement to the decades-old Naga problem.

Singh said his government had been engaged in purposeful dialogues with the "disaffected groups" in Nagaland to find a lasting solution to the problem of the northeastern state.

Addressing a well-attended election rally in Kohima, the prime minister said, "Development requires peace, stability and security and we alone are sincerely committed to bring a lasting peace to the region, in particular Nagaland".

"We have been open and liberal in our approach and are hopeful that we will succeed in our efforts towards finding an honourable solution," he said.

Singh said the people of Nagaland were fed up with violence and his government was willing to go the "extra mile" to find permanent peace in the state where people want to be the part of an overall process of development and change in the country.

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Six injured in Assam blast, ULFA blamed

At least six people were injured, four of them critically, in a powerful explosion at a crowded marketplace in Assam on Wednesday.

Police said the blast took place at a busy commercial area in Tezpur, the district headquarters of Sonitpur, about 180 km north of Assam's main city of Guwahati.

"The bomb was strapped to a bicycle and went off in a market area injuring six people," a senior police official said over the phone.

Four of the injured were stated to be in critical condition. "The injured were shifted to local hospitals with multiple wounds," the official said.

The victims were all shoppers and vendors. Police blamed the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), fighting for an independent homeland since 1979, for the explosion.

"The modus operandi of the blast points the needle of suspicion to the ULFA. There are no other militant group active in the area other than the ULFA," the official said.

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