The move comes in the wake of the railways having to hard-sell the
recently commissioned east and west
freight corridors to potential bulk customers, and the issues that have
cropped up of the network planning of these projects. The capacity utilisation of the two corridors remain low.
The members of the railways board and the Dedicated Freight Corridor
Corporation (DFCCL) have already met once to discuss DPRs. “The reports for new
DFCs have been submitted to the rail ministry for further approvals, but it is
likely that the railways will not pursue the proposed corridors. Instead, the focus will be on building
commodity-based corridors as announced by the finance minister,” said the
official.
In her interim Budget speech, finance minister Nirmala
Sitharaman had announced major railway corridor projects. These are exclusive
corridors for specific commodities – energy, mineral and cement – and for
specific purposes like port connectivity, and high-traffic density.
“The projects have been identified under the PM Gati Shakti
for enabling multi-modal connectivity. Together
with DFCs, these three economic corridor programmes will accelerate our GDP
growth and reduce logistic costs,” FM had said recently.
“The commodity-specific
corridors make more sense because there will be existing customers for them. The DFCCIL has been hard selling the eastern and western dedicated
freight corridors.. there are issues with the network planning of these
projects,” said the official.
The capacity utilisation levels of the 1,337-km EDFC and 1,506-km WDFC
remain fairly low. For instance, the fully-completed EDFC has a capacity to run
120 trains each way per day but due to low demand, just about 75-80 trains are
being operated at the moment. EDFC connects power plants in the northern states
of UP, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and parts of Rajasthan with Eastern coal fields.
Traffic on EDFC also comprises finished steel, food grains, cement, fertilisers
and limestone.
WDFC, which still has a 109-km
stretch under construction, is running just 40-45 trains per day (each way)
against the capacity of 120 trains. This stretch is
used primarily for export-import container traffic and transporting milk
from Gujarat to northern India.