Railways see no red signal despite slowdown

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New Delhi, Nov 14: The Indian Railways is confident of chugging ahead despite the global slowdown and achieve the targeted 1,100 million tonne of freight and 8.4 billion passengers by the end of the 11th Plan period.

“Indian Railways requires an investment of over Rs 2,50,000 crore during the ongoing 11th Five Year Plan to augment and upgrade the infrastructure. About Rs 90,000 crore will come from internal generation and as per the present indications, may supplement it through a budgetary support of Rs 60,000 crore, said Railways Board chairman K C Jena during the key note address at the Investment Forum jointly organised by the ministry of railways and International Union of Railways.

Jena said the growth would falter unless Railways carry out a well thought out programme for capacity augmentation, removal of bottle-necks, modernisation of systems and new innovative ways of conducting business. Therefore, a significant expanded role has devolved upon mobilising of extra-budgetary resources including through public-private-partnerships (PPP) in the 11th Five Year Plan.

“PPP is not possible without mutual respect and a deeply shared spirit of co-creation and sharing of gains between government and private sector. Areas have been identified and earmarked on this basis, he said. These include; world class stations, setting up of manufacturing units and logistic parks, catering and tourism etc. These are areas where the needed complementarities exist and can be harnessed to the advantage of railways,” added Jena.

“After having a good, though limited, experience with PPP, Indian Railways have created a dedicated public private partnership cell in the ministry to provide a single-window service for PPP initiatives and to speed up the execution of projects so that it can be expanded in scale and scope,” said Jena.