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Rail Shortage Puts Indian Railways Safety Upgrade At Risk
Railway signals at New Delhi Station (Ramesh Pathania/Mint via Getty Images)
State-owned Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) will be unable to meet the demand for new rails, delaying the planned $15 billion safety overhaul of Indian Railways, reported Neha Dasgupta for Reuters.
SAIL has said it will meet only 78 per cent of the demand in the year extending till the end of March 2018. This has led to an escalation of the matter by the Indian Railways to the Prime Minister’s Office, documents accessed by Reuters show.
Rail upgrades will now take longer as supplies are expected to improve only next year. This is a setback to the government, whose priorities are “track renewal” and “capacity augmentation” with the support of the railway safety fund.
In the past couple of years, track defects have caused 25 per cent of train accidents. A $15 billion dollar fund was set up in February to fix that.
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