New Delhi: The Indian Railways has lined up Rs 13.68 trillion capital investment for its ambitious plan of infrastructure development in the next five years, informed a top official on Friday.
Aiming for capacity enhancement and modernisation of the existing rail network, the Railways is also going to double the tracks of around 34,642 kilometres in its high density networks, which covers 96 per cent of the traffic movement.
"The major projects lined up include commissioning of the dedicated freight corridor by December 2021, upgrading of high density network (HDN) to 130 kmph by March 2023, doubling and electrification of all HDN and highly utilized network (HUN) by March 2024 and further upgrading all HDN routes to 160 kmph capacity by March 2025," explained Chairman Railway Board, Vinod Kumar Yadav.
Based on traffic density, type of commodity moved, importance of route from strategic consideration, etc, the projects requiring urgent expansion including those which are already progressing well (expenditure more than 60 per cent) have been categorised as supercritical projects. Meanwhile, the projects requiring completion in the next age have been defined as critical projects.
"There are total 58 Super Critical and 68 Critical projects identified for the resource allocation. Super Critical projects has been targeted for completion by December 2021, while critical by March 2024," Yadav said.
On the matter of capacity enhancement, Yadav claimed that in the next five years, Railways would be able to meet its demand as the operations of private trains will also get started by the time. However, he said that Indian Railways has decided to extend the timeline to introduce the first passenger train of a private operator by an year, from 2023 to 2024.
The Railway official also mentioned that tenders for upgrading two Railway Stations with largest footfall - New Delhi and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in Mumbai, are expected to be invited within two weeks with an investment of over Rs 6,600 crore.
Earlier on Thursday, Indian Railway Stations Development Corporation Ltd (IRSDC) shortlisted nine companies for the station redevelopment project of 4 stations - Nagpur, Gwalior, Amritsar and Sabarmati, on a public-private partnership (PPP) model. The participating applicants are GR Infraprojects, Kalpataru Power Transmission, GMR Business and Consultancy, Anchorage Infrastructure, Monte Carlo, JKB Infrastructure + DMIA, Kalyan Toll and Cube Construction Engineering.
"We are targeting to finalise these tenders in the time period of next two months," he added.
He also asserted that the national transporter will focus on maximizing freight revenue for which rationalization has been considered. However, freight rates won't be slashed. "We have created Business Development Units for the task and they are talking to stakeholders. This does not only mean reducing rates. But yes, we will be able to work out scheme where we would be able to increase the volumes," Yadav added.
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