Railways to spend Rs10 lakh cr to connect cities via high-speed corridors
06 Mar 2018
Indian Railways, seeking to connect all major cities of the country via high-speed trains, is expected to announce the construction of high-speed corridors worth Rs10 lakh crore.
The corridor, said to total 10,000 km, will be a part of the government's Bharatmala highways development programme.
"The plan would be announced in April," a rail ministry official told The Economic Times. "We'll unveil the routes that would be connected along with the funding mechanism."
High speed train corridors are new railway lines that will be built over national highways or on railway lands that are parallel to functioning railway routes. While the existing rails let trains run at about 55-112 km per hour, trains on these lines would be able to run at a speed of about 200 kph.
The government plans to build double lines on single pillars to halve the cost of construction from Rs200 crore per km to Rs100 crore per km, the report said.
Speaking of the cost of building such corridors, the official told ET that Indian Railways would welcome global players in the project through large tenders. Funding could also come through borrowings from financial institutions and other agencies.
"The operational profitability of such projects is high as the revenues would also come from the non-fare box such as commercial exploitation of stations as the metro has done," the official added.
Meanwhile, a vital step towards starting the big-ticket project of Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail corridor, popularly called the Bullet Train project, begun last week.
The Maharashtra government handed over land papers for the bullet train to the Indian Railways.
These papers are of the land space required at Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) where an underground station for the Bullet Train will come up. For several months, there was gridlock over acquisition of 0.9 hectares of land for the project. The planning and development agency of MMRDA has proposed an International Finance Service Centre over the same plot.
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