Tweet: So it’s official now. No more Railway Budget henceforth. 92 year old institution started in 1924 gets merged with Union Budget.
Tweet: Positives about abandoning Rly Budget (1) no forum for populist announcements (2) no cross-fertilisation of budgetary grants & dividends.
Railway Budget: 92-year-old journey comes to an end: The Rail Budget is all set to be merged with the Union Budget. As a result, the railway ministry will not have to depend on budgetary grants from the Consolidated Fund of India and will not have to pay the annual dividend. It is also expected a view will be formed on the ‘social obligations’ of Indian Railways.
Tweet: Actually achieved. FE reports India built 2,400 km of highways in the April-July 2016 period. This averages 20 km/day. Good show!
Highway construction speeds up: Highway building reached a new high in April-July 2016, thanks to a focus on conventional government-funded engineering, procurement and construction projects. The ministry is optimistic of reaching its target of 15,000 km (or 41 km/day) by the end of the year.
Tweet: How the Discom Dilemma creates anomalies in the power market—UP power PPA bids at around R5.5; whereas spot prices down to 2.16!!
Discoms’ pricing conundrum: The continuing inability of discoms to pick up load on a regular basis is leading to this rather interesting situation where power plants are willing to sell in the spot market at very low rates to keep their operations going, but would certainly look at much higher longer-term sustainable rates.
Tweet: Using RailTel fibre to link a network of digital screens for content indeed a powerful idea for Rlys to mop up Rs 12,000 crs in ad revenues.
Railways bets on advertising to shore up revenues
The Indian Railways plans to install 100,000 big digital screens at 2,175 stations and stream content and ads on these. The objective is to target annual revenues of around R11,770 crore in five years through exclusive rights for advertising.
Tweet: Rajya Sabha informed only 55% of total rural households use electricity as main source of lighting. How then is India “power surplus?!”
Power deficit in rural India: According to Census 2011 data, 55% of rural households and 92.67% of urban households use electricity as the main source of lighting. Power minister Piyush Goyal said the government is planning to install feeder meters in every feeder to provide accurate figures related to demand of electricity.
Tweet: CAG pulls up CivAvMinistry for wasteful exp in devping Gondia Airport—linked to UPA era Minister. No checks & balances by bureaucracy?!
Ghost airports: Gondia is one of the 30 airports developed by the civil aviation ministry in the past decade where no flights have commenced. Some of the others are Kolhapur, Sholapur, Akola and Jalgaon. Rajasthan and Punjab have three each in the list, in cities such as Jaisalmer, Bhatinda, Ludhiana and Pathankot.
Tweet: Like Land Bill, gas price has also become a non-issue. Gas price (as per formula) likely to fall now to $2.45 per mmBtu. Remember 8.4?!
Gas prices to fall further: Natural gas price paid to producers like state-owned ONGC and other private producers is likely to fall 20% to $2.45 in October. Prices dropped four times in the last 18 months following the formula approved by the govt in October 2014.
Tweet: Nobody specifically! Quite convenient for investigating team to say “all at fault!”—IIT-KGP committee on Kolkata flyover collapse.
Flyover collapse: All-round disaster: The report of the expert committee comprising former faculty members of IIT Kharagpur points to faulty design, poor quality of material and lack of supervision for the collapse of the Kolkata flyover which led to 27 deaths.
—Vinayak Chatterjee is Chairman of Feedback Infra
His Twitter handle: @Infra_VinayakCh
A weekly selection of the author’s tweets—
with a brief backgrounder—in the infra space, by Adite Banerjie