With a thrust on investment in infrastructure, the Union Ministry of Railways has been allocated ₹2.55 lakh crore for the financial year 2024-25, up by 5.8% from last year’s allocation of ₹2.41 lakh crore.
Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that up to 82% of last year’s allocation had been spent by the end of January.
According to the Interim Budget 2024 document, the Ministry of Railways could only utilise ₹1.6 lakh crore, based on the actual numbers released for 2022-23.
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Mr. Vaishnaw said that the revised operating ratio for 2023-24 was 98.7%, which is the ratio of working expenses to traffic earnings. “All expenditure for pension is being borne from railway revenue,” he added.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech, said that the Centre will implement three major economic railway corridor programmes — energy, mineral and cement corridor, also being referred to as Energy Economic Corridor; port connectivity corridor a.k.a Rail Sagar; and high traffic density corridors a.k.a Amrit Chaturbhuj.
A total of 434 projects with an investment of ₹11 lakh crore will be rolled out under these programmes, said Mr. Vaishnaw. “An integrated approach to railway planning has been undertaken by consulting 18 Ministries and this plan has been in the works for the past two years. We are in the process of preparing detailed project reports, freezing final alignments and interacting with State governments for the smooth working of the development along these corridors,” Mr. Vaishnaw said in response to a question by The Hindu.
The corridors have been planned along the lines of PM Gati Shakti framework by tracking the origin and destination nodes of railways across India. “This allows us to understand where we need to add a railway section, which areas require doubling or multi-tracking of routes, where we need rail-over-rail flyovers, or where we need to deploy new lines. For instance, how do we better manage passenger traffic flow from Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha towards Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru or how do we manage large transport origin from Nasik,” the Minister explained.
Over the next five years, the Railways Ministry is planning to overhaul 40,000 train bogies to provide a better passenger experience similar to that of the Vande Bharat trains. The entire exercise is expected to cost ₹15,200 crore.
“Good quality toilets, better safety standards like installing semi-permanent coupling, features like presence of charging points, automatic water measurement systems for filling up of tanks, installation of GPS and CCTV cameras will be added features in upgraded coaches,” Mr. Vaishnaw said.
Notably, budget allocation for investment in public sector units and joint ventures has decreased from ₹34,353 crore in 2023-24 to ₹31,107 crore in 2024-25. Experts say this is because the Railways is interested in opening up the market to private players.
The bullet train project by National High Speed Rail Corridor Limited has attracted the maximum chunk of allocation, up from ₹19,592 crore to ₹25,000 crore. The project when implemented will reduce travel time between Mumbai and Ahmedabad from five-six hours to three hours.
