Siemens Mobility in India wants standardisation of metro rail projects, akin to what has been done in China. This will hasten the pace of implementation, Tilak Raj Seth, Executive Vice-President, Siemens Mobility, told BusinessLine in an interview. Excerpts:

Standardisation accelerates the pace of adding infrastructure. Every city has different needs in terms of number of people and locations to be connected. A train that runs in Mumbai cannot be the same as one in Indore or Bhopal. It can be standardised according to a city’s population. The elements of infrastructure must be standardised at the planning stage itself so that every other city is not doing the same work afresh.

We are far away from the basic standardisation. We have cars of 2.9 m, 3.1 m, 4-car, 3-car combinations, coming from different manufacturers. China works with a car A, car B, car C, which match different needs. And the whole value chain matches A, B and C. But then they started on metro rail long back, so they reached standardisation. We started just one-and-a-half decades ago, but now is the time to catch up.

There is a need to standardise at the planning stage — it can’t be done during implementation. There are so many manufacturers of full cars and sub-systems. Once a decision is made, regardless of the number of manufacturers, the end products should look and perform alike and have the same sub-elements. ‘Same’ now does not mean for all cities, but for a category of cities and category of capacities.

We are doing electrification of Kolkata, Chennai and Greater Noida metro, and nearly half of phase 3 of Delhi metro. We are participating in all the new projects. Very recently, we got a large signalling contract in Nagpur, and are already doing some signalling in Delhi and Chennai.

For the Railways, we are doing electronic interlocking, and Siemens today has commissioned more than 250 stations, which is large.

We want to get into mainline electrification. We participate in various initiatives of the Railways where there is modern infrastructure addition, such as Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation. We don’t have a contract, but are keenly and competitively participating in many of them. Our work on electrification of metros has really gone up over the past four-five years.

Another area of expansion that we as an industry are looking forward to is the implementation of modern technology electrical multiple units at Kachrapara — on the lines of railway locomotive projects awarded to GE and Alstom.

I don’t want to say they are not encouraging.

So much work on infrastructure is required that building it with only gross budgetary support, or with your own funds, is not feasible. So, items like annuity and revenue sharing are important. The risks need to be balanced on both sides.

In an annuity model, we can give an unsolicited bid. Then, they have to follow whatever is required in procurement. We have respect for it.

No, we haven’t as yet, but we’re also seeing what’s going on in this area.