THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Even as K-Rail claims that NITI Aayog hasn’t made any final calculation on total project cost for the SilverLine semi-high-speed rail project, NITI Aayog data retracts K-Rail claims. An RTI reply by NITI Aayog clearly states that as per the agency’s assessment, the project cost (as per 2020 March estimate) would come to around Rs 1.26 lakh crore, as against DPR estimate of Rs 63,940 crore.
Refuting the statement by Railway expert Alok Kumar Verma during the parallel debate on SilverLine that the NITI Aayog calculated the project cost as Rs 1.3 lakh crore, the KRDCL issued an official statement on Wednesday, stating that the agency has made no such calculation. However, an RTI reply issued by NITI Aayog to M T Thomas, of Peruva, in November 2020 has gone into details of the cost factor. The agency assessed the total project cost – as per March 2020 prices – would be Rs 1,00,352 crore.
As per Silverline Detailed Project Report (DPR), the calculation is just Rs 55,053 crore. The RTI further stated that the price escalation at 2.2% for the period of construction would be Rs 14,826 crore, while the DPR had calculated this as Rs 8,723 crore. Excluding IDC (Interest During Construction), the cost would be Rs 1,15,179 crore, says NITI Aayog, while as per DPR, it would come to Rs 63,776 crore. While the DPR has calculated the IDC (1.4% interest and 5% hedging cost) and currency fluctuations as Rs 164 crore, as per NITI Aayog assessment, this would be Rs 6,425 crore.
While the DPR finalised a total estimate of Rs 63,940 crore, as per NITI Aayog, it is Rs 12,6081 crore. Construction of project cost per kilometre is estimated at Rs 121 crore in the DPR, but according to NITI Aayog it would be Rs 238 crore. “Going by K-Rail’s own assessment, there will be a 5% cost escalation every year. The NITI Aayog data is as per March 2020.
We can therefore easily foresee a cost escalation of around Rs 6,000 crore annually,” said environmentalist Sridhar Radhakrishnan. Recently Metroman E Sreedharan had stated that the project completion cost would be around Rs 1.2 lakh crore. In the detailed RTI response, the NITI Aayog has raised many queries and pointed out several other aspects of the DPR. It says that the cost seems grossly underestimated and needs to be reviewed. It further pointed out that the cost of acquisition assessed in DPR too was underestimated.