Title - Railway Projects through PPP

There is a huge shelf of ongoing projects and limited availability of resources. As on April 1, 2011, there are 340 ongoing new line, gauge conversion and doubling projects requiring about Rs. 1,25,000 crore for their completion.

Funds for these projects are provided as Gross Budgetary Support on yearly basis from Ministry of Finance and Planning Commission. Moreover, steps have been taken to generate extra budgetary resources through State participation, Public Private Partnership (PPP), defence funding, declaring some projects as National Projects, revival of Capital Fund and implementation of bankable projects through Rail Vikas Nigam Limited.

For augmenting investments, the projects that have been identified for execution through PPP are (i) High Speed Corridor (Mumbai-Ahmedabad), (ii) Elevated Rail corridor in Mumbai suburban section, (iii) Redevelopment of stations, (iv) Logistics Parks, (v) Wagon leasing and other freight schemes, (vi) Port connectivity projects, (vii) Dedicated Freight Corridors, (viii) Loco and Coach Manufacturing Units and (ix) Captive power generation; Renewable energy & other energy saving projects.

In addition, a draft policy for private participation in capacity augmentation and connectivity projects containing different models for different categories of such projects has been prepared. These covers 1) Non-Government Railway lines; 2) Special Purpose Vehicles through Joint Venture; 3) Build Operate Transfer (BoT); 4) BoT – Annuity; 5) User funded lines to be used as multiple user lines; and 6) Capacity augmentation funded by customer.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Railways, Shri Bharatsinh Solanki in a written reply in Rajya Sabha today.