Word: ir
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sarah Kreimer, associate director of Ir Amim, a left-wing Israeli pressure group, says that Plan No. 13157 will complete a chain of development projects designed to prevent any possibility that a Palestinian state gains a toehold in the southern part of East Jerusalem bordering Bethlehem. There are a lot of large projects that are now moving through the planning process, Kreimer tells TIME. "They create an urban wedge between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It closes off the option of any kind of negotiations on the whole southern border...
...Finally, passenger trains have also been increased in length. Until a few years ago a typical train had about 15 carriages. IR officials discovered that a passenger-train journey could earn a profit with 24 carriages, which became the target length. By pushing the "quicker, heavier, longer" mantra, rail bosses have also been able to improve services. For example, in 2006 IR began offering special express trains on certain routes such as the run between New Delhi and Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Tourists making day trips to India's most popular tourist attraction now can book online...
...vilified by his many detractors who claim his term as Chief Minister of Bihar was characterized by mismanagement and corruption. When he became Rail Minister in 2004, Yadav asked Kumar and his team to run the system on sounder business principles, even as it stuck to what Kumar calls IR's "social obligations" to its passengers, its 1.4 million employees and 1.1 million pensioners. Yadav's standing has soared as a result. "A person who was considered a clown of Indian politics is now being seen as a professor of Harvard graduates," says Kumar...
...more charity. IR wants to compete. Hoping to grab more of the long-haul freight business lost to truckers in recent years, rail bosses plan to borrow at least $15 billion to build a dedicated fast-freight corridor between Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). They also have big plans for some of the 1 million acres (420,000 hectares) of land that IR owns along rail lines and around stations and shunt yards. Real estate developers are currently bidding to overhaul the first of 16 major stations. At New Delhi's central station, which is likely worth billions...
...Still, IR has miles to go before it can be called a first-class operation. Train travel in India remains infuriatingly slow. A 1,378-mile (2,217 km) trip from New Delhi to Goa just before Christmas, for instance, took me 35 hours, almost a day longer than a train trip over a similar distance in Europe would take. Because of a lack of equipment and tiny station platforms, freight is sometimes thrown from trains in heaps. The heavier loading, critics charge, has caused more breakdowns. (Kumar denies this.) Older carriages can be dirty, shabby and full of cockroaches...