National Rail Plan: Indian Railways’ route to growth
Often, people do not notice what the Union Budget says about Indian railways (IR). Points that may register are the following. (a) There is a National Rail Plan (NRP) for 2030. (2) Western dedicated freight corridor (DFC) and Eastern DFC will be commissioned by June 2022.
Parts of DFC will be in PPP mode. (3) There will be an East Coast corridor (Kharagpur to Vijaywada), East-West corridor (Bhusaval to Kharagpur/Dankuni) and North-South corridor (Itarsi to Vijayawada). (4) All broad-gauge routes will be electrified by December 2023. (5) There will be safety and passenger amenity measures. One hundred years before 2030, in 1930, Mumbai-Pune Deccan Queen was started.
This is the only train with an official birthday, on June 1, 1930. IR has come a long way since 1930, and down the years, several committees have probed IR’s erosion in competitiveness and suggested solutions. However, in the historical evolution of railways in India, the emphasis was on passengers, not freight. Geographical parts of the country, important from a freight perspective, were bypassed. Therefore, even towards the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, railways didn’t contribute as much to growth as it did in other countries.
“When the idea of constructing railways in India was first started, it was considered that there would be little passenger traffic on account of the poverty of the people and that the chief business would be derived from goods”. That is not what happened.
