Railway infra projects worth Rs 21,000 cr get CCEA approval

New Delhi, August 24 

Intending to give a major push to the Railways’ effort to de-congest the New Delhi-Chennai and Howrah-Mumbai sectors, the government today gave its nod to nine projects, which included doubling and tripling of lines, worth about Rs 21,000 crore. These projects would be completed in the next four years. Once completed, these projects would augment Railways’ capacity to 1.50 billion tonnes of freight and also faster movements of the passenger trains.

Today’s decision will yield over 1,937-km-long additional track capacity, which would give a big boost to currently saturated golden quadrangle corridors. “The North-South and East-West corridors of the Railways currently are running at 120% capacity. The current freight capacity of the railway network is 1,100 million tonnes, which will reach 1,200 million tonnes next year,” said Railway Board Chairman AK Mittal.

Mittal further said, the approval of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) will now allow the Railways to build the third line, which will have bi-directional signalling system. “This will allow us to run trains on both sides unlike the case with the first and second line. The Mumbai-Howrah and New Delhi-Chennai lines would get third lines, which would give a boost to the capacity augmentation effort of the Railways,” he added.

The nine projects would cover 11 states, including Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Assam. There are seven third line projects, besides one fourth line and one doubling project.

These projects on completion would help the Railways to carry more coal since they would connect more coal mining states. Since July 2015, the CCEA has approved 53 projects with over 5,019 kms long track length worth Rs 48,555 crore.

Mital also informed that the Railways had taken Rs 9,000 crore of loans from the Life Insurance Company last year, while in the current financial year it is Rs 20,000 crore. The Railways had secured a loan of Rs 1.50 lakh crore from the LIC. He also stated that the nine projects approved by the CCEA would be funded through extra budgetary resources.