Indian Economy News

Railways to propose Rs 40,000 crore-Kharagpur-Vijayawada freight corridor for Budget 2019

New Delhi: The Indian Railways is going to propose inclusion of India’s third freight corridor between Kharagpur and Vijaywada section to be built at the cost of Rs 40,000 crore in the Budget 2019-20. The project also called East Coast Corridor will be 1,114 km in length and is a part of the Golden Quadrilateral project of Indian Railways.

Dedicated Freight Corridor Corp. of India Ltd (DFCC) managing director A.K. Sachan said, “Just few days back DFCC has sent the proposal to Indian Railways to undertake the third dedicated freight corridor project. Indian Railways is going to take the project with finance ministry for its inclusion in Budget 2019-20.” He added the project will be funded using equity from Indian Railways and rest through loans. The decision was taken as Kharagpur-Vijaywada section is one of the busiest routes in East Coast.

The Indian Railways, through its arm DFCC, is already undertaking construction of two freight corridors called Eastern Freight Corridor from Ludhiana to Dankuni (1,856 km) and Western Freight Corridor from Dadri to Jawaharlal Nehru Port (1,504 km) being built at cost of Rs 81,000 crore.

On August 15, DFCC conducted successful train run on the newly build Ateli-Phulera section of Western Corridor. The 190 km route in states of Haryana and Rajasthan has ability to run trains at a speed of 100 km per hour as against the current maximum speed of 75 km per hour on Indian Railways track.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget Speech 2016-17, had proposed to take up three more freight corridors—East-West Corridor (2,328 kms) between Kolkata and Mumbai, North-South Corridor (2,343 km) between Delhi and Chennai and East Coast Corridor (1,114 km) between Kharagpur and Vijaywada.

The Railways in its Preliminary Engineering Cum Traffic Survey (PETS) Reports of these three corridors had said that the corridors will run parallel to the existing alignment and will be designed for no surface crossing and rail flyovers. The freight traffic projections in the three new corridors as per PETS reports indicate a level of approximately 1300 million tonnes by 2026-27.

According to a Parliament response by the minister of state for railways Manoj Sinha, the completion costs for the projects are estimated to be Rs 1,10,529 crore for East-West Corridor, Rs 1,04,471 crore for the North-South and Rs 56,749 crore for the East Coast Corridors.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

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