The Union Cabinet approved the setting up of a railway development authority, a regulatory body.

It will have a Chairman and three members, who will be appointed for a fixed tenure of three years. It will have an initial corpus of ₹50 crore.

It will have a mandate of tariff setting, ensuring fair play and level playing field, setting efficiency and performance standards and disseminating information.

The regulatory body will be set up within parameters of the Railway Act. This has been a long standing demand of investors in the Railways.

The Railways has been cross-subsidising its passengers fares against the freight fares, as it is usually under pressure not to increase tariffs. It estimates its social cost obligation at ₹35,000 crore.

As the Railways opens up to private investment, investors, who work with an aim to maximise returns for shareholders, have concerns about taking on the social obligation of the Railways.

The Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA) has given its nod for a one-year extension for the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS).

The project, approved by the CCEA in 2009, has enabled the creation of a nationwide networking infrastructure for evolution of IT-enabled-state-of-the-art tracking system around ‘Investigation of crime and detection of criminals’.

According to an official statement, an allocation of ₹2,000 crore has been made for CCTNS project of which, ₹1,550 crore has been spent till 2016-17.

The Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) aims to integrate the CCTNS project with e-courts and e-prisons databases in the first instance and with the other pillars of the criminal justice system.

The Cabinet also approved the closure of the Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Suraksha Yojna (MGPSY).

In another decision it also gave nod to an Air Services Agreement between India and Georgia on the International Civil Aviation Organisation template. In addition to this, the Memorandum of Understanding between the Airports Authority of India and its French Counterpart, Civil Aviation Authority got the cabinet’s approval.

The collaboration agreement to support the Belmont Forum Secretariat also got the Cabinet’s assent. This is a high-level group of the world’s major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils.

The Cabinet also approved an MoU on passenger cruise services on the coastal protocol routes between India and Bangladesh and an MoU between the two countries in the field judicial sector cooperation.

An MoU on cooperation in the field of mass media between the two nations was also approved.

Also an MoU between India and Australia on cooperation in medicine and health was approved.