The Hindu Business Line : `A roadmap to make Rlys the economy's life-line'

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New Delhi Feb. 26 The 2007-08 Rail Budget presented by the Rail Minister, Mr Lalu Prasad, has drawn up a roadmap for making the country's major mode of transport the life-line of the economy and the people in the next five years, entailing a massive investment of Rs 2,50,000 crore.

Disclosing this to Business Line here in an exclusive interview, the Financial Commissioner, Indian Railways, Mr R. Sivadasan, said the underlying objective of the development-centric budgetis to strengthen the railway system — more of doubling, freight facility, loading and unloading terminals, coaches and locomotives with high capacity wagons and high speed corridors.

Even as the actual Tenth Plan (2002-07) outlay is likely to be above Rs 82,000 crore, Mr Sivadasan is sure of finding massive outlay for the futuristic development plan of the Railways.

He said that internal generation of railways itself will not be less than one lakh crore of rupees. The railways market borrowing would be Rs 40,000 crore in the next five years and the remaining Rs 1,10,000 crore consists of Rs 60,000 crore from government budgetary support and Rs 50,000 crore through public-private partnership (PPP).

Corridors planned

Stating that worldwide rail transport consists of metro, freight corridor, long distance trains and high-speed passenger corridor, Mr Sivadasan said the railways would commission a pre-feasibility study for four corridors — North, South, East and West.

He said the idea is to have trains run at 250 km per hour and "we will see that the fare will also be structured in such a way that even middle class will be able to afford it".

Asked about when the first such corridor would be a reality, he said: "may be in 2012-13. If the budget airlines are now dreaming and capturing our traffic we want to take the battle into their backyard".

The country is now growing young and by 2012 nearly 50 per cent of the population would be within 25 years of age and they are mobile and need fast transit train.

He said that once the travel time between Delhi-Amritsar, Chennai-Bangalore, Cochin-Bangalore or Mumbai-Ahmedabad is cut to less than 2 to 3 hours, more people would patronise these passenger corridors, "as they are environmentally friendly" and do not cause carbon dioxide emission, which is the prime cause for global warming and associated water shortage in India and Bangladesh because of melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Mode of funding

To a query about funding these corridors, Mr Sivdasan said, "it would be zero net cost to government" as the railways possess prime land which would be put up for construction of a shopping mall, quality hotel, information technology and IT-enabled services for taking up commercial space by private developers. Just like GMR company is building runway and city-side amenities to fund its greenfield airport or modernisation plans, the railways too use the private investment to get the passenger corridors built.

On the distinctly upbeat finances of the system which have left a surplus of Rs 20,000 crore, the Financial Commissioner quipped that the "best way to improve finances is to effectively use the existing assets and that is what we have done".

These include saving in time at the loading and unloading terminals, speeding up trains and reducing the turnaround time.

In passenger trains, "we have added more coaches in the same trains and more berths are available. Other steps include extension of train and introduction of new trains and by slightly redesigning the coaches and by increasing the average speed of the trains.''

Traffic volume

Asked whether such high volumes of traffic on extant assets would not lead to dilution and stress, Mr Sivadasan said, "as of now it is not.

"We have been carrying out track renewal and other investments and clearing the backlog in maintenance and with these we are able to carry extra traffic without much of a problem.

"At the same time, in maintaining these assets also, we are spending more money and the money is spent effectively to see that assets are well maintained and do not take any kind of stress on that".

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