Discarding the 92-year-old tradition of presentation of a separate Rail Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is all set to announce major infrastructural boost in his first Rail Budget subsumed with the General Budget on Wednesday.
A safety fund of Rs 20,000 crore, station re-development, setting up of Rail Development Authority and High Speed Rail Authority besides a truck route worth Rs 21,000 crore between Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi Howrah are some of the major highlights to be incorporated in Jaitley’s Rail Budget allocation.
Reeling under a series of derailments, the Budget is likely to announce creation of a separate safety fund of about Rs 1 lakh crore over the next five years out of which Rs 20,000 crore will be earmarked for 2017-18.
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, who had written to Jaitley seeking Rs 1.19 lakh crore as a special safety fund, finally succeeded in getting a nod from the Finance Ministry for creation of a separate fund for the badly-needed safety upgradation of rail infrastructure.
While Rs 15,000 crore will be from the gross budgetary support, Railways will have to generate Rs 5,000 crore from internal sources. An ambitious project of increasing train speed up to 160-200 km per hour on major trunk routes will be announced which will involve fencing of the Delhi-Howrah and Delhi-Mumbai routes at an estimated cost of Rs 21,000 crore.
Railways will also miss the operating ratio target of 92 per cent and is likely to settle at about 94-95 per cent. The Budget will also give a fillip to non-fare revenue exercise and monetising assets like vacant land, estimated to be about 48,000 hectares including redevelopment of stations with private participation.
Railways, which is losing both passenger and freight volumes, witnessed its traffic receipts in April-December 2016 down to Rs 1.19 lakh as against Rs 1.34 lakh cr target, a negative growth of more than 11 per cent.
Despite the introduction of flexi-fare, the passenger revenue segment has also witnessed a fall in earnings by over 9 per cent as compared to the last year.
The plan outlay is likely to go up from Rs 1.21 lakh crore to about Rs 1.36 lakh cr in the next fiscal. Railways have accelerated spending by over 28 per cent on infrastructure projects in the nine months of the current fiscal as against the corresponding period in the last fiscal.
Expenditure on projects like laying new tracks, doubling and electrification of network across the country during April-December 2016 has witnessed a significant jump touching Rs 68,059 crore mark as compared to the Rs 53,118 crore in the same period last fiscal, which was an increase of 28.1 per cent, according to the Railways data.