Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India has planned to form a special purpose vehicle for setting up four mega multimodal logistic parks in Gujarat and Haryana. The parks will be established along the proposed western dedicated freight corridor from Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Mumbai to Dadri near Delhi. The four parks, two each in Gujarat and Haryana, are estimated to be set up at a investment of Rs 4,000 crore in public private partnership mode. The SPV will arrange for the land and oversee the setting up of the parks by private firms. The parks will provide mechanised inventory management and reduce the cost in the supply chain to customers.
The parks are part of Indian Railways? bigger plan to provide value-added services to increase its share of freight transport. At present railways handle nearly 65% of freight traffic in the country but is working toward improving the same to earn more. For 2010-11, the national transport is looking to transport 944 mt of freight against 888 mt last fiscal.
?We expect that the total required investment will be Rs 4,000 crore as a logistic park takes at least Rs 1,000 crore to set up, depending on the size,? a senior official in railways wishing not to be named told FE.
There will be minimal equity participation from DFCCIL. ?Our equity will be limited to the cost of land acquisition only. Rest of the investment will be put in by private companies,? said a senior official in DFCCIL requesting anonymity. He said the private companies will get the right to recover their investment by charging a fees to customers. ?The concession period could range from 20 years to 30 years,? the DFCCIL official said.
The parks will become operational by 2016-17, simultaneously with the completion of western dedicated freight corridor. DFCCIL plans to build more parks in the future as more corridors come into operation. The eastern corridor between Dankuni in West Bengal and Ludhiana in Punjab is also likely to complete by 2016-17.