Govt may shelve Rs 2-trn freight corridor plan

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.