Interim Finance Minister Piyush Goyal has set the railway capex for FY20 at record Rs 1.6 lakh crore.
Budget 2018-19 had set capital expenditure for railways at Rs 1.48 lakh crore.
Goyal announced capital support for railways at Rs 64,587 crore for FY20 in his
Budget 2019 speech.
In the previous Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said most of this money would be spent on capacity expansion, since it was a priority for the national transporter. He proposed a target of doubling 18,000 km of lines and said gauge conversion was underway to eliminate capacity constraints.
The minister said 36,000 km of rail track renewal had been targeted in the coming year while 4,267 unmanned railway crossings on broad gauge routes were to be eliminated in the next two years.
In a historic move, the government merged the railway budget with the general budget in 2017, ending a 92-year-old practice of a separate budget for the country’s largest transporter. The total proposed outlay for 2017-18 was Rs 1,31,000 crore, an 8 per cent increase from the 2016-17 budget. The proposed plan outlay for 2016-17 was Rs 1,21,000 crore, a 21% increase from the 2015-16 budget.
The size of the plan budget had gone up by 52% from 2014-15 to Rs. 1,00,011 crore in 2015-16. In Railway Budget 2014, then railway minister Sadananda Gowda had proposed the highest-ever plan outlay of Rs 65,445 crore.