Focus on improving railways infra for seamless traffic movement: Prabhu

The Dollar Business Bureau

In order to create a proper logistics environment and seamless movement of traffic in the country, Ministry of Railways is focussing more to improve the railways infrastructure and also to speed-up the pace of infrastructure development, said Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu on Thursday. 

“Railway Ministry is focussing more on improving the infrastructure of Indian Railways to create a proper logistics and seamless movement of traffic,” said Prabhu at an event organised by ASSOCHAM in New Delhi.

“Therefore, we have decided to create an infrastructure at much faster pace. Already we are creating infrastructure twice to speed than previous year and will increase every year,” he added.  

Citing the Ministry’s achievement, Prabhu said that his ministry has sanctioned around 16,500 km of doubling and tripling lines in the last three years compared to just 22,000 km in the past 70 years.

So far, just 42% of electrification of railway lines has been made and this will double in the next five-year plan, he said.

“We are already creating about 100 private freight terminals with private participation so that more and more traffic can come to the railways,” he said.

Prabhu said that his Ministry working on reducing energy consumption in railways. “We already plan to save about Rs.41,000 crores from the energy bill and have already saved around 10% of that,” he said.

“So, all of this will result in creating a good logistics backbone for the country and will help it to do much better business as logistics is the key to success for industrialisation.,” he added.

On port-rail connectivity, the Minister said that the port-rail connectivity is already happening properly and we are inviting private participation in various sectors.

Terming Goods Services and Tax (GST) as a ‘game changer’ for the country, he said that it has created a fiscal situation wherein the goods and services can move without any hindrance from one end of the country to another.