Railways to invest 8.56 crore, to help Infra Companies

In a bid to revamp the whole railways infrastructure, Government of India has taken a clear path of Public Private Partnership (PPP) model and it is going at a brisk pace to implement various project under different categories. 

These projects relates to rail connectivity, capacity augmentation and various other modes. In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha Minister of state of Railways Manoj Sinha said; “Model Concession Agreements for Non-Government line model, Joint Venture, Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) and Customer funded models have been issued.”

In totality 28 projects have been taken up by the government under PPP mode for railways and out of this 9 projects have been implemented and 13 projects are already been approved by the government for implementation. “6 projects have been given ‘in principle’ approval,” minister added. 

Experts are of the opinion that as government is quite focused on the development of railways infrastructure, it would clearly benefits big infrastructure EPC companies like L&T, BHEL, ABB, Alstom, besides steel manufacturers like SAIL, Tata Steel, JSPL and JSW steel. In an interesting move government has also provided concession agreements for these projects that will provide for conciliation, arbitration and adjudication for resolving disputes of between various partners and government. To make these projects profitable and financially viable, thorough studies have been undertaken on the basis of operational requirement, bankability, financial viability and interest of stakeholders. 

As far as investment is concerned into railways, a whopping Rs 8.56 lakh crore will be invested during next 5 years. Government has invested Rs 65,798 crore during FY15. “This was financed through Gross Budgetary Support, Internally Generated Resources and Extra Budgetary Resources like market borrowings etc,” informed Sinha. Going forward Rs 3.5 lakh crore would go into over three hundred ongoing new line, gauge conversion and doubling projects.