NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday announced a record Rs 1.10 lakh crore allocation for the Indian Railways of which Rs 1.07 lakh crore would be for capital expenditure.
“The plan is to create a future ready railway system by 2030 bringing down the logistic cost for industry is at the core of the strategy to enable Make In India,” she announced in Parliament.
Noting that the eastern and western dedicated freight corridors would be completed by mid-2022, Sitharaman proposed a host of other initiatives.
“The following additional initiatives are also proposed. The Sonenagar-Gomoh section of 263 km on EDFC will be taken up in PPP mode this year itself. Gomoh-Dankuni section of 274.3 km will also be taken up shortly in short succession,” she said.
The Railways, Sitharaman said, will take up works for future dedicated freight corridor projects — East Coast Corridor from Kharagpur to Vijaywada, East-West Corridor from Bhusawal to Kharagpur to Dankuni and North-South Corridor from Itarsi to Vijaywada. Complete electrification of broad gauge route would be done by December 2023.
Stressing on the passenger convenience and safety, she said the Railways would introduce the aesthetically-designed vistadome Linke Hofmann Busch coaches on tourist routes for better travel experience to passengers.
Two new technologies — metro lite and metro neo — will also be adopted by the national transporter to provide metro services at much less cost with same experience, convenience in tier II and tier III cities and peripheral areas.
For safety, trains on high-density network would be provided with indigenously developed automatic train protection system that eliminates train collision resulting out of human error.