On September 27, 2006, the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone in Ludhiana, the starting point for the eastern sector of the multi-crore ?Dedicated Freight Corridor? project. Earlier that year, Lalu Yadav announced, in his budget speech, the inclusion of a Rs 66,000 crore project, which would connect the four metros by a separate rail corridor. This was with a view to achieving a quantum jump in the railways? capacity to move freight and win a higher market share. The very next year, an SPV called the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation India Limited (DFCCIL) was set up to undertake the project, which Lalu Yadav had boasted would complete by 2013.

A few years down the line after the ?turnaround? of the Indian Railways, when Lalu Yadav claimed to have earned billions, carefully chronicled by Sudhir Kumar, his Officer on

Special Duty in a book entitled From Bankruptcy to Billions, he did not envisage a funds crunch.

However, DFCCIL is now busy parlaying with industrial bigwigs to take the much touted PPP route, especially for the Rs 8,500 crore Sonnagar-Dankuni section in the eastern sector, added by Mamtadi as soon as she took over the reigns of Rail Bhavan. The government is understood to be in advanced stages of discussions with the World Bank for funding a part of the 1,131 km-long Ludhiana-Khurja-Kanpur-Mughalsarai section. Some progress has been made on the ground?construction of the Karwandiya-Ganjkhwaja section of the eastern corridor was inaugurated by Sonia Gandhi over a year ago.

However, land acquisition is the key to the project and during their inception more than 150 years ago, most of the railways had taken over substantial land ensuring the right of way for their track alignments, with enough room to accommodate four pairs of tracks. Hence, even though a route shorter by as much as 300 km would have been feasible from Ludhiana, the northern most take-off point to Mumbai over the great Thar desert, an existing alignment of 1,483 km from Delhi (Dadri/TKD)-Ajmer-Ahmedabad-Mumbai/Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust was preferred, since over 90% of the land for an additional pair of tracks was already available.

Moreover a 150 km-wide belt of industrial complexes had been simultaneously planned along this route, which would have immensely benefited from it and also offered substantial valuable export traffic to DFCCIL. The 1,806 km-long eastern sector, however, did not offer the luxury of an entirely new alignment. Sticking to the existing Ludhiana-Delhi-(TKD-Dadri)-Kanpur-Mughalsarai-Dankuni was considered more cost-effective and involved very little new land acquisition. However, even this is turning out to be quite a herculean task, with vast tracts near major junctions already built up with authorised and unauthorised structures, mostly housing colonies.

The final location survey and alignment were completed for almost the entire section on the eastern and western DFCs, between Sonnagar and Ludhiana and Rewari and JNPT respectively, more than a year ago. Now the onerous task of land acquisition is being vigorously pursued. For this, no less than nine field units, each one under a chief project manager, have been created in Mumbai, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Ajmer and Jaipur on the western corridor, and Ludhiana, Kanpur, Allahabad and Kolkata on the eastern corridor. 11,535 hectares spread over 2,793 km for both the corridors, are essential for its early completion. The project is spread over an area of about 4,295 hectares on the eastern, and about 7,240 hectares on the western sector.

By the end of 2008-09 notifications for land acquisition under Section 20A of Indian Railways (Amendment) Act, 2008 had been published for more than 2,300 km spread over 9,000 hectares in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bihar and Maharashtra. Notifications, this time under Section 20E of the same Act, have been issued for 179 km, spread over about 476 hectares in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The latest rough estimates of land acquired is around 2,000 hectares or 20% of the total required.

A team of international consultants in the field of railway construction and general civil engineering consisting of Parsons (as the lead consultant), Brinkenhoff, Halcrow, Wilbur Smith and Lee Associates promises to guide the DFCCIL in negotiating various roadblocks in its path to a speedy completion of the multi-crore project. They will also aid the incorporation of state-of-the-art technology in the field of ?heavy haul?, which should give the Indian railways capability to move higher levels of freight a major boost. Wagons with higher axle load of 32.5 t against the current 22.5 t, 1,500 metre-long trains as against the current 686 metre, speeds of 100 kmph, a 33% jump over the current 75 kmph, the dedicated freight corridors promise to meet the railway?s freight transport needs for the next 25 years, if not more.

The author is a former member (mechanical), railway board