Comments
The Railways will soon move a Cabinet note to put in place a ₹35,000-crore fund, called the Railways of India Development Fund (RIDF). The Railways will have a minority stake of up to 49 per cent in the fund, which will be used over seven years, according to Railways officials.
The remaining stake will given away through a competitive bidding process, and the partner could be anybody —say multilateral or bilateral institutions such as World Bank, IFC, or even LIC.
The fund will be used for providing long-term debt and equity to all rail-related projects and for various kinds of project financing, including those undertaken by private firms, the officials said at a conference, declining to be quoted. So, even a railway station developer could take funds.
Another fund of India, the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), with a corpus of ₹40,000 crore, puts in only equity.
The Railways also plan to seek Cabinet nod to put in place Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata fast track corridors to be able to run faster trains.
“The project — whose cost is an estimated ₹17,000 crore for both the corridors — will be taken up through RITES and IRCON, who will be the project management consultants. They, in turn, will hand over the project too other sub-project management consultants. This project will be constructed like the dedicated freight corridor project,” the officials said.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.