NEW DELHI: Indian Railways would soon announce a Rs 10 lakh-crore high-speed train corridors construction plan to connect all major cities in the country, covering almost 10,000 kilometres, along the lines of the government’s Bharatmala highways development programme “The plan would be announced in April,” a top rail ministry official said. The government plans to build double lines on single pillars to halve the cost of construction from Rs 200 crore per km to Rs 100 crore per km. Also, light-weight aluminium coaches would be specifically designed for trains to be run on electric traction.The mechanism of funding would most likely be borrowings from financial institutions and multilateral agencies along with monetising land bank. “The operational profitability of such projects is high as the revenues would also come from non-fare box such as commercial exploitation of stations as metro has done,” the official said. Railways minister Piyush Goyal has asked his officials to work on speed, scale and skill to achieve early implementation of these projects.The government is currently constructing a 534 km-long bullet train corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad at a cost of over Rs 1 lakh crore.

Source: Economic Times March 05, 2018 01:18 UTC