Indian Railways (IR) has been provided a never before allocation of Rs 1,10,055 crore in this year’s Union Budget. Delivering the Union Budget speech on Monday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said “I am providing a record sum of Rs 1,10,055 crores, for Railways of which Rs 1,07,100 crores is for capital expenditure.”
This follows the Centre’s move to make IR future-ready by increasing the capacity required to last until 2050. A month ago, IR unveiled its National Rail Plan-2030. This outlined the manner in which IR would enhance its capacity to carry goods and passengers while increasing its modal share from 27 to 45 per cent during the period 2030-2050.
“Bringing down the logistic costs for our industry is at the core of our strategy to enable ‘Make in India’,” the Finance Minister said.
Route Electrification
The Finance Minister observed that 100 per cent electrification of broad-gauge routes in the country will be completed by December 2023. As on October 1, 2020, 41,548 route km was electrified and this is expected to reach 46,000 route km by March 2021 (72 %)
Dedicated freight corridors
The Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) and Eastern DFC will be commissioned by June 2022.The Sonnagar – Gomoh Section (263.7 km) of Eastern DFC will be taken up in PPP mode in 2021-22 while the Gomoh-Dankuni section of 274.3 km will also be taken up in short succession.
Detailed Project Reports for future DFC projects will be undertaken in the first phase. These include the East Coast corridor from Kharagpur to Vijayawada, East-West Corridor from Bhusaval to Kharagpur to Dankuni and North-South corridor from Itarsi to Vijayawada.
Measures for passengers
For better travel experience on tourist routes, introduction of an aesthetically designed vista dome LHB coach was announced. An indigenously designed Automatic Train Protection system will be introduced on IR’s high-density (HDN) and highly utilised (HUN) railway networks to eliminate train collision due to human error.
National Monetisation Pipeline
The Centre will launch a “National Monetization Pipeline” of potential brownfield infrastructure assets, the Finance Minister said. This is imperative as monetizing operating public infrastructure assets is a very important financing option for new infrastructure construction.
An Asset Monetization dashboard will be created to track progress and provide visibility to investors.IR will monetise its DFC assets for operations and maintenance, after commissioning. Also monetised under this programme will be other
Railway Infrastructure Assets
Metro Railway Funding
The Centre has allocated funding for FY22 for the following metro railway systems across the country:
- Kochi Metro Railway Phase-II of 11.5 km at a cost of Rs 1,957.05 crore.
- Chennai Metro Railway Phase-II of 118.9 km at a cost of Rs 63,246 crore.
- Bengaluru Metro Railway Project Phase 2A and 2B of 58.19 km at a cost of Rs 14,788 crore.
- Nagpur Metro Rail Project Phase-II: Rs 5,976 crore
- Nashik Metro at a cost of Rs 2,092 crore respectively.
Alterative transportation systems, being called ‘MetroLite’ and ‘MetroNeo’ will be deployed to provide metro rail-like systems at much lower costs. These systems will have the same experience, convenience and safety as standard metro systems and will be used in Tier-2 cities and peripheral areas of Tier-1 cities.
As on date, a total of 702 km of conventional metro is operational and another 1,016 km of metro and RRTS is under construction in 27 cities.
Finally, the Union Budget has also extended the benefit of Project Imports to all high-speed railway projects.
This an excellent budget.
Nothing more more should be expected.The vission of the Finance Minister is appr