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Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd (APSEZ), India’s biggest private port operator, is setting up a platform company to hold all its rail infrastructure assets and for investing in rail entities.
Currently, the firm’s rail assets are held under Adani Logistics Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of APSEZ.
Adani Logistics is India’s largest and diversified private train operator holding a Category 1 permit to run container trains across India.
“The plan to create a separate platform company for the rail assets is in the early stages; APSEZ will start working on that soon,” a person briefed on the plan said without divulging details. “APSEZ will talk about it after the platform company is set up,” he said.
A spokesman for APSEZ declined to comment.
Adani Logistics runs 60 container rakes, five freight terminals, seven grain rakes, and two BOXN-HN rakes under the General-Purpose Wagon Investment Scheme (GPWIS).
The GPWIS allows private firms to invest in general purpose rakes for transporting restricted commodities like coal, coke, ore and minerals which till 2018 were completely controlled and regulated by the Indian Railways.
Apart from allowing movement of all commodities, the GPWIS safeguards private players’ investment by ensuring that the wagons procured under the policy will not be merged with the Indian Railways pool which was not the case with previous wagon investment schemes.
The company also runs rail assets in Dhamra and Mundra ports. All these will be put under a platform company which will provide services to customers. The rail volumes handled by Adani Logistics doubled to 325,067 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in FY20 from 150,942 TEUs in FY19.
In the fist quarter of FY21, the rail volumes jumped 37 per cent to 76,925 TEUs from 56,060 TEUs a year ago as the lockdown restrictions and shortage of truck drivers forced exporters and importers to shift to rail from road for evacuation of containers.
The move also comes in the backdrop of the government’s move to privatise state-run rail hauler Container Corporation of India Ltd (Concor) for which the Adani Group is seen as a top contender.
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