Railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Saturday said the Indian Railways will start trials of Vande Bharat sleeper trains in the next two months and operations of these trains will likely start six months after the trials.
The Vande Bharat sleeper class trains are self-propelled trains that will offer superior features than Rajdhani Express trains. “We are going to have about 250 of these trains by 2029,” Vaishnaw said.
Commenting on the weak financial condition of the national transporter, the minister said a major reason is heavy subsidising of tickets.
“In a normal scenario, if the cost of a product is Rs 100, we would sell it at Rs 105-110. But in the case of rail tickets, the government is paying Rs 55 from its pocket. The annual subsidy burden of the government is Rs 59,000 crore,” he said.
The minister also acknowledged that the decision to withdraw concessions offered to senior citizens had an impact on the elections. Concessions for senior citizens were withdrawn during the pandemic in March 2020 in an effort to improve the financials of the railways. Vaishnaw, however, did not say if the decision would be reversed.
Citing growing traffic during the summer season, Vaishnaw said the railways ran 19,837 trains carrying nearly 40 million passengers across the country. He said the automatic train protection (ATP) system, Kavach, has been installed across a route of 6,000 km. So far, the tenders for Kavach have been awarded for the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah corridors. “Because of this system, railways will be able to run more trains on the existing tracks. Recently, the Kavach system has been granted a patent as well,” Vaishnaw said.
He further said over 5,300 km of new tracks (including doubling of existing lines and gauge conversion) have been commissioned in FY24, which was slightly higher than the FY23 (over 5,200 km). “The addition of new lines will continue at the same pace going forward,” he added.