Mega infra push: 400 Vande Bharat trains, 8 ropeway projects planned

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, February 1

The national highways network will be expanded by 25,000 km in 2022-23. Over Rs 20,000 crore will be mobilised through innovative ways of financing to complement the public resources.

Four hundred new-generation Vande Bharat trains with better energy efficiency and passenger-riding experience will be developed and manufactured during the next three years. The Railway Ministry has been allocated budgetary support of Rs 140367.13 crore.

Contracts for eight ropeway projects of 60 km will be awarded in 2022-23. Ropeway service may be introduced in congested urban areas, where conventional mass transit system is not feasible.

While rolling out the schemes in her Budget speech in Parliament today, Finance Minister Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said these schemes were part of the government’s ambitious “PM Gati Shakti” project.

Underscoring the key role the government expected the PM Gati Shakti project to play in infrastructure development, Sitharaman said the project was a “transformative approach” for economic growth and sustainable development. “It is driven by seven engines, namely roads, railways, airports, ports, mass transport, waterways, and logistics infrastructure. All seven engines will pull forward the economy in unison,” she said. The projects pertaining to these seven engines in the National Infrastructure Pipeline will be aligned with the PM Gati Shakti framework. Sitharaman proposed to increase the outlay for capital expenditure by 35.4 per cent over the previous year (from Rs 5.54 lakh crore in the current year to Rs 7.50 lakh crore in 2022-23). It is 2.9 per cent of the GDP.

Speeding up with PM Gati Shakti

• PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan for multimodal connectivity, launched in October 2021, is an initiative aimed at coordinated planning and execution of infrastructure projects
• The objective is to bring down logistics costs
• It is a digital platform bringing together development projects of 16 ministries, including the Railways, for integrated planning and implementation