FOLLOWING a spate of train crashes in recent months, India’s finance minister, Ms Nirmala Sitharaman, has approved spending of Rs 1.09 trillion ($US 20.5bn) on measures to improve safety by Indian Railways (IR) in 2024-25.
While Sitharaman made no specific mention of the rail sector in her budget speech on July 23, official documents reveal that funding for IR will be Rs 2.62 trillion, up from the previous record of Rs 2.4 trillion in 2023-24.
The Indian government will provide Rs 2.52 trillion in budgetary support for IR, while Rs 100bn will come from extra-budgetary resources.
IR’s operating ratio, or the proportion of revenue used to cover expenses, is forecast at 98.22% in 2024-25, down slightly from 98.65% in 2023-24.
Gross traffic receipts at IR in 2024-25 are forecast to rise substantially to Rs 2.78 trillion from the revised estimate of Rs 2.58 trillion for 2023-24. Passenger receipts are expected to increase to Rs 800bn from the revised 2023-24 estimate of Rs 730bn.
Industry experts and former rail officials have expressed their disappointment at the absence of the railway sector from the budget speech. The interim budget presented by Sitharaman in January announced plans to build three freight corridors and refurbish 40,000 coaches.
Railways minister, Mr Ashwani Vaishnaw, sought to fill in the gaps at a post-budget press conference. He says that major projects such as the new line to Jammu and Kashmir, the Dedicated Freight Corridors and the Mumbai - Ahmedabad high-speed line will not suffer due to inadequate funding.
Vaishaw reported that the upgraded Version 2.0 of India’s domestically-developed Kavach ATP system has recently been approved by the Research and Development Standards Organisation (RDSO). “Rapid deployment of Kavach can now be expected” he says.
Progress on rolling out Kavach has so far been slow. It is currently in service on less than 2000km of the 69,000km IR network.
In February 2017 the government established RRSK, a dedicated fund that was provided with Rs 1 trillion for safety work at IR over a five-year period.
While there is no word whether this programme has been extended, IR officials say that the larger allocation for safety in the 2024-25 budget could help to make progress in this field, where the current situation is unenviable.
Staff shortages, including signallers and track maintenance personnel, are continuing to have an impact on rail safety.
“Rail safety cannot be ensured by way of big financial allocations alone,” says former Railway Board member, Mr Subodh Jain.
“Equal emphasis is needed on a host of management issues to rearrange the command and control structure that was disrupted following the merger of eight railway cadres into the Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS).”
