With the highest ever capital expenditure of over ₹1.60 lakh crore estimated for the Indian Railways, travellers can expect the government to offer better services and amenities, Railway Minister Piyush Goyalsays.
What can train passengers look forward to in the coming year?
I will urge you to remember your journey five years ago and look at them now. Look at the level of cleanliness, beautification of stations. Many stations are now flooded with airport-like lighting. By and large every toilet is kept clean now. We have a separate ladies toilet across India. Almost one-third of the toilets are disabled-friendly. And we are trying to rapidly expand that so everywhere we can have a disabled friendly toilet.
This year we have the highest ever outlay for capital expenditure for Railways of over ₹1.60 lakh crore. A lot will be invested in bettering passenger amenities such as waiting rooms and food stores. Kitchens are being upgraded and now you can see those kitchens on your mobile phone. Gradually, I want to expand the kitchen so that all the food comes only from those kitchens.
Right now we have some private caterers awarded contracts before our government, we are forced to continue them. We tried to kick out some they went to court and got a stay order.
We want passengers to report to us if they ever find a bad experience. We can then act upon it. In the next few months, we will provide WiFi at all station. This will benefit not only the passengers, but also student and people living in villages near stations. We are also looking at increasing train speeds and enhancing punctuality, while also focusing on safer railways.
A lot of emphasis of the Budget was on PPP partnerships.
There have been a lot of success stories for PPP… in roads crores of investment has come in. Likewise in airports, there have been big scale PPP projects. In railways, the model hasn’t been used much but we are starting now. We will look at PPP rolling stock manufacturing and delivery of passenger freight services. We need an investment of ₹50 lakh crore in Railways till 2030. Hence we will look at public-private partnership for faster development.
Where will the ₹50 lakh investment largely go into?
The ₹50 lakh crore investments discussed in the Budget has a lot of dimensions. We have to examine the precise requirements such as where do we need more dedicated freight corridors, more semi-high speed or high speed trains and double, triple or quadruple lines. We are doing studies on these.
The Budget has also proposed additional cess on diesel. How will it impact Railways’ costs?
We are moving so rapidly to electrification that I don’t see any significant impact of this on the railways… Logistics costs is not just a function of what is the price of diesel today or tomorrow. You have to do it intelligently. You have to look at multimodal way of working. For example, that could be a possibility that we have a roll on, roll off service... A truck comes from the factory loaded with a container of material, you just drive it up on the train. It goes to the destination, drives down goes to the port itself... There is no loading, unloading. You have to use innovative ideas for which we have a new logistics division in Ministry of Commerce and I had extensive discussions with them, looking at all their plans.
