Efforts to use only made-in-India components, reduce imports to zero: Railway Board chairman

New Delhi, June 19

The Railways aims to use only made-in-India components and reduce imports to zero, a top official said on Friday, a day after the transport behemoth decided to cancel the contract of a Chinese firm in a signalling project.

VK Yadav, Chairman, Railway Board (CRB), during an online media briefing, also said: “We are making efforts to see that the products manufactured by the Railways are exported.”

Replying to a question on whether the Railways was considering banning Chinese companies from participating in its infrastructure biddings, Yadav said mostly only domestic players were allowed in railway tenders.

“Mostly we are inviting tenders where only domestic bidders are allowed to participate,” he said.

For the past two to three years, the Railways had taken many steps to reduce the import content, the CRB said.

“We have implemented the Make in India policy. For example, in our signalling system, the way we have initiated the tender policy, our Make-in-India component has become more than 70 per cent.”

“Our effort is to ensure that we use more and more made-in-India products and make the import component zero. We are also making efforts to see that the products manufactured in railways are exported,” Yadav said.

The Railways on Thursday said it had decided to terminate the contract of a Chinese company due to “poor progress” on signalling and telecommunication work on the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor’s 417-km section between Kanpur and Mughalsarai.

The Railways had given the Rs 471 crore contract to the Beijing National Railway Research and Design Institute of Signal and Communication Group in 2016.

They were supposed to complete the work by 2019, but only 20 per cent of the work had been completed so far, the Railways had said.

The move came after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a fierce clash with Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh early this week, the biggest military confrontation between the two countries in over five decades.

The officials, however, said the decision to cancel the contract of the Chinese company had nothing to do with the ongoing faceoff.

It was the poor performance and inability to deliver the project on time that led to the decision by the implementing agency, the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation Limited (DFCCIL), the officials said.

The officials added that the DFCCIL had already applied to the World Bank, which was the funding agency, to initiate the process of cancellation. PTI