With ‘Vanda Bharat’ Express having a smooth run between New Delhi to Karta in Jammu region, the Indian Railways has set its eyes on completing all its pending projects by 2022, the 75th year of Independence. Vande Bharat express that was launched by the Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday (October 3, 2019), is the second such super fast and modern train to run on the rail tracks, the first one being the New Delhi to Varanasi route, launched some eight months ago by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Success of Vande Bharat coupled with people’s enthusiasm towards modern equipped trains with less travelling time, has also provided option for the Indian Railways to start running privately operated Tejas express trains. According to the Railways, 40 new Vande Bharat trains will start running to different places. This is a priority area and different aspects of these new trains and routes are being worked out.
Minster of Railways Suresh C Angadi who travelled all the way from New Delhi said, “ Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed the Indian Railways to complete all its pending projects and works by 2022, the year in which India would be celebrating 75 year of Independence. All our energies are focused on speeding up work on the ongoing projects and also review projects that have not met the deadline. We are modernizing passenger services along with introducing state of the art trains such as Vande Bharat and Tejas. Electrification, installation of CCTV cameras, advanced signaling system and augmenting the capacity of railway tracks”, adding that new projects will be commissioned only after the pending projects are completed.
Construction of Dedicated Freight Corridor, electrification of railway tracks, doubling of tracks are some of the major projects that have been running behind the schedule. “We have reviewed the progress of these ambitious projects and are determined to complete it by 2020”, Angadi said.
Talking to The Pioneer, the minister said, “While fast tracking railway projects, the safety of the passengers will be accorded topmost priority. We want to provide world class, safe and less time consuming rail services to the passengers”.
“Earlier, there were only two news channels, that too government channels. But later private channels were also allowed to operate”, Angadi said adding that private operators and Indian Rail Catering Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) are the new channels that have been brought into to make more competitive and also run advanced trains successfully.
Ministry of Railways has proposed to allow private operators to operate trains on long distance or overnight journey trains on Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Lucknow, Delhi-Jammu/Katra, Delhi-Howrah, Secunderabad-Hyderabad, Secunderabad-Delhi, Delhi-Chennai, Mumbai-Chennai, Howrah-Chennai and Howrah-Mumbai routes, he said.
When asked about advancement made by China and Japan in running bullet trains that touch the speed of 400 kms an hour, the minister said that Railways are aware of this fact and are making sincere efforts and effecting suitable changes to run high speed trains. “Trains in our country are not running even at 160 kmph and a lot of work needs to be done before high speed trains could be launched”, he added.
‘Modernization of the countrywide rail network is a challenging task and it requires a large scale investment. We are open to private operators and agencies interested in investing in developing rail infrastructure and running high tech trains”, the minister said.
“Lucknow-New Delhi and Mumbai-Ahmadabad that witness heavy traffic have been awarded to the IRCTC for operations while Railways has initiated the process to award new train routes to the private operators on inter-city services on 14 routes. Apart from these, there are 10 overnight and long distance services and four suburban services that will see private operators entering into the fray”, said a senior official of the Indian Railways.
There is another significant plan by the Railways to corporatize the Rae Bareli Modern Rail Coach Factory (RCF) in Uttar Pradesh. It will be followed by the corporatization of other RCF units at Kapurthala and Chennai.
“Plan is afoot to create a Public Sector Unit (PSU) as that would invite investment from the public and business houses as well. This is still in initial stages but will be set rolling once the concept note prepared by the Railways in this regard, gets the Union Cabinet’s nod”, said the official.