Within the passenger fares itself, there will be an effort to remove cross subsidisation. It would, in fact, be less by Rs 200 crore this year from last year's figure of Rs 2,800 crore, said Aggarwal at the customary post-budget briefing.

Aggarwal said the hike in freight charges by four per cent would have very moderate effect on inflation as the freight, which was untouched last year has been increased by much less than inflation rate.

Aggarwal said freight traffic of 450 million tonne last year did not materalise because of slowdown in the economy due to which movement of coal alone was less by 15 million tonne.

He said this year the freight has been pegged at the same level as last year and a number of new marketing schemes have also been devised to attract idle freight on short lead traffic like offering 25 per cent concession infreight rate for traffic hauled distances of up to 50 km.

The government has decided to construct two new railway lines in the Eastern sector for improving the traffic movement between India and Bangladesh.

Aggarwal said nine km of railway line between Aukhori on the Bangladesh border to Agartala and a eight-km stretch between Bangaigaon to Petrapole (a border post) will be laid.

He said India and Bangladesh have four train points and out of that the above two are going to be taken up under a multilateral cooperation programme involving China, Japan, Bangladesh and India.

He disclosed that recently in one such meeting held under the aegis of International Railway Cooperation, of which India is the chairman, it was decided to construct a super highway from Singapore to England via Mynamar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and some of the CIS countries.

"Thrust will be on the augmentation of popular trains", said Aggarwal, adding that more proposals for contract trains will be looked into.

The RailwayBoard chairman said that new wagons will be purchased only for replacing existing ones and not for capacity generation for which designs of the wagons will also be suitably altered to augment capacity.

About commercial utilisation of land by the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation, the Railways plans to let out the commercial area on a lease than outright sale.