Nine Years Of Indian Railways: Giant Strides In Rail Sector With Kavach, Vande Bharat And Bharat Gaurav Service

Moving on the growth trajectory, Indian Railways has witnessed a significant enhancement in passenger amenities, goods loadings and infusion of a massive capital expenditure in the last nine years.

Going beyond Rajdhani, Duronto and Shatabdi, introduction of semi-high speed Vande Bharat service and theme-based Bharat Gaurav tourist trains besides Tejas, Humsafar, and AC economy trains during 2014-23 are hallmarks of the nine years period.

There are 25 Vande Bharat and 57 Bharat Gaurav trains, besides 1,307 new trains launched in this period to cater to the growing number of passengers.

Ongoing redevelopment work for over 1,200 stations and modern facilities like Wi-Fi, escalators, lifts, foot over bridges and CCTV cameras at all major stations are being provided with the aim to provide improved amenities to the passengers.

There were 23,500 coaches deployed to run these 1,307 trains while the Railways increased the frequencies of 234 services during this period with 6,874 coaches attached on permanent basis with various trains to accommodate increased number of passengers.

The national transporter, the lifeline of the nation carried 60,465.32 million passenger during the last nine years.

In 2014-15, the Railways carried 8,224 million passengers which rose to 8,107 million in 2015-16, 8116 million in 2016-17, 8,286 million in 2017-18, 8,439 million in 2018-19. The passenger number witnessed a fall in 2019-20 due to the Covid when all passenger-carrying trains were suspended.

It was 8,086 million in 2019-20, again a sharp fall to 1,250 million in 2020-21.

However, with normalcy returning in 2021-22, the trains services resumed gradually and there were 3,519 passengers booked tickets that year. In 2022-23, the railways clocked total 6,438.32 million passengers.

Freight Loadings

Freight loading is the dominant sources of revenue for Indian Railways and incremental loading has been continuously achieved in recent years.

Various policy initiatives were taken in these years to boost incentives to the customers to shift toward rail mode.

With a view to provide first and last mile connectivity Roll On-Roll Off services have been introduced. To improve transparency and provide fast track services to customers, demurrage system has been streamlined in freight transportation.

With the entire process digitised and online, demurrage calculations are done without any human interventions leading to stoppage of revenue leakage and improved asset utilisation.

In 2013-14, the Railways carried 1050 million tons of goods which increased to 1100 MT in 2014-15, 1101 MT in 2015-16, 1106 MT in 2016-17, 1160 MT in 2017-18, 1221 MT in 2018-19.

However, the loadings decreased to 1208 in 2019-20 and again rose to 1233 MT in 2020-21, 1418 MT in 2021-22 and 1512 MT in 2022-23.

For the current fiscal, the Railways aim to achieve loadings of 1600 MT.

Capital Expenditure

The government has recognised the need for sustained investment on rail infrastructure and has progressively scaled up investment nearly five times from Rs 54,000 crore in 2013-14 to Rs 245,300 crore in 2022-23.

In 2022-23, the Gross Budgetray Support (GBS) of the government to Railways for capital expenditure was Rs 159,100 crore. For Budget Estimate of 2023-24, Rs 2.60 lakh crore Capex has been provided.

This enhanced Capex will give a major boost to capacity augmentation and network expansion and will ultimately help in bringing down the overall logistic cost for the economy.

The Capex was Rs 65,445 crore in 2014-15 which increased to Rs 100,011 crore in 2015-16, Rs 121,000 crore in 2016-17, Rs 131,000 crore in 2017-18, Rs 148,528 crore in 2018-19, Rs 148,064 crore in 2019-20, Rs 155,162 crore in 2020-21, Rs 215,058 crore in 2021-22, Rs 245,300 crore in 2022-23 and Rs 260,200 crore in 2023-24.

Covid-19

Considered as lifeline of the country, the entire passenger operation was suspended during the Covid period though the freight operation was on to provide essential items like food grains, medicines and other goods during 2020-21.

The Railways undertook a massive operation of nearly 400 special trains across the country to carry stranded people during the Covid.

Safety

Safety continues to be the top most priority for Indian Railways. barring the Odisha tragedy which claimed nearly 300 lives and injured over 900 passengers, consequential train accidents have reduced from 135 in 2014-15 to 55 in 2019-20 to 48 in 2022-23.

Signal Passing at danger cases have also reduced from 57 in 2019-20 to 35 in 2022-23.

In order to improve safety for road and rail users, 880 manned level crossings have been eliminated and construction of 230 Road Over bridges and 835 road under bridges was done in 2022-23.

Kavach, the indigenously developed accident prevention system has been commissioned on 1465 km and fitted in 174 locomotives, while there is a plan to cover the entire rail network with Kavach system.

Currently the works on Kavach are in progress on 3000 km on Delhi-Howrah and Delhi-Mumbai routes.

For fast pace of execution of projects, a paradigm shift has been brought in planning of projects, so that available resources are utilised judiciously for optimum results.

The Railways has drawn a roadmap to complete all identified gauge conversion and executable doubling works on priority.

Expanding the rail network, Railways has achieved 3,925 km of new line, doubling and gauge conversion in 2022-23.

Working along the priorities, 12 super critical and 13 critical works were completed during these years. These include important projects as Vijaywada - Gudivada - Bhimavaram - Nursapur doubling, Daund - Gulbarga doubling, Bina-Kota, Bhimsen - Jhansi, Virangam - Samakhiali, Rourkela - Jharsuguda third line, Palanpur - Samakhayali and Hubli - Chikjajur routes among others.

In order to expedite commissoning of projects, various measures have been taken. Thrust has been given on proper project preparation, advanced land acquisition, formation of Gati Shakti Units in Divisions.

Electrification

Railway Electrification is another area where significant focus was given. As a result, Indian Railways achieved the highest ever commissioning of 6,566 route km of electrification.

This is in line with the Mission 100 per cent electrification by December 2023 and commitment of the Railways to contribute towards energy security, saving precious foreign reserves towards fuel bill and environment sustainability.

Gati Shakti

Aiming at promoting synergy between sectors of the Railways, shipping, roadways, telecommunications, pipelines etc, by avoiding unnecessary duplication in infrastructure creation and thereby prevent wastage of precious national resources, the government formulated Gati Shakti national Master Plan.

Indian Railways has immediately imbibed the principles of Gati Shakti in its project planning process. The impact of Gati Shakti is visible in the form of sanctioning of nine times the project as per last years increase in new track construction, 50 times increase of station redevelopment projects and 143 per cent increase in automatic signalling.

All new terminals are now being developed under this policy instead of the earlier private freight terminal and private siding policies.

So far 38 Gati Shakti terminals have been commissioned in less than one year.

In 2022-23, the Railways inducted 1187 locomotives and 22,790 wagons, a quantum jump from earlier.

Dedicated Freight Corridor

Eastern and Western Dedicated Freight Corridors have been taken up to decongest the existing Indian railways network, increasing the average speed of goods trains, heavy haul trains at higher axle load, facilitate running of longer and double stack container trains.

The project which was on the slow track, got expedited in the last nine years and today it is nearing completion.

While the entire Eastern DFC is ready now, the Western DFC would be completed by December 2023.

Bullet Train

The bullet train, a dream project of Indian railways to run train at 350 kmph speed is no longer at drawing board stage. Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed train project with Japanese fund is also picking up speed with over 30 per cent physical progress.

With an expenditure of Rs 40,591 crore incurred upto 31 March 2023, the financial progress is about 34 per cent.

FDI and PPP

Two loco factories came up during this period in PPP model with FDI, a first in rail sector with FDI provision.

There are now two loco factories operational at Marhora and Madhepura making high horse power diesel and electric locomotives on PPP model. While Marhora factory is being run by GE, Madhepura factory is by Alstom.

With increased volume of capex, trains, passengers, goods, swanky stations with Wi-Fi, food courts and shopping malls, the future of Indian Railways seems to be very bright as it is an important part of the nation's journey.