Context: Indian Railways has come up with a Draft National Rail Plan, to address the inadequacies of capacity constraints and improve its modal share in the total freight ecosystem of the country.
Key Points
- The National Rail Plan will be a common platform for all future infrastructural, business and financial planning of the Railways.
- This plan is being circulated among various Ministries for their views and Railways aim to finalise the Final plan by January 2021.
Objectives of the Plan
- To create capacity ahead of demand by 2030.
- Net Zero Carbon emission by 2030, as part of a national commitment to reduce Carbon emission and to sustain it.
- Forecast growth of traffic in both freight and passenger year on year up to 2030 and on a decadal basis up to 2050.
- Formulate strategies based on both operational capacities and commercial policy initiatives to increase modal share of the Railways in freight to 45% by 2030.
- Reduce transit time of freight substantially by increasing average speed of freight trains from present 22Kmph to 50Kmph.
- Reduce overall cost of Rail transportation by nearly 30% and pass on the benefits to the customers.
- Identify infrastructural bottlenecks that would arise in future with growth in demand.
Vision 2024
The Vision 2024 has been launched (as part of the National Rail Plan), for accelerated implementation of certain critical projects by 2024 such as
- 100% electrification,
- Multitracking of congested routes,
- Upgradation of speed to 160 kmph on Delhi-Howrah and Delhi-Mumbai routes,
- Upgradation of speed to 130kmph on all other Golden Quadrilateral-Golden Diagonal (GQ/GD) routes and
- Elimination of all Level Crossings on all GQ/GD routes.
Hence, the National Rail Plan envisages an initial surge in capital investment right up to 2030. Post 2030 , the revenue surplus generated would be adequate to finance future capital investment and also take the burden of debt service ratio of the capital already invested, without exchequer funding of Rail projects.