Indian Railways has identified 58 super-critical and 68 critical projects worth more than Rs 1,15,000 crore for completion by March 2024 to improve mobility, safety and create additional capacity for running more passenger and freight trains on saturated and busy routes.
The national transporter has targeted for early completion of the projects by focussed funding and continuous monitoring as it has become imperative to ease the burden of railway traffic on the golden quadrilateral, high density network routes and highly utilised network routes. The high density and highly utilised network routes constitute 51% route length of the railway network but carries 96% of the traffic.
The 58 super critical projects with a total length of 3750 km and cost of Rs 39,663 crore, are those involving multi-tracking – doubling/3rd line/4th line on busy routes – and requiring urgent expansion, including those which are already progressing well. Till date, 29 super critical projects with a total length of 1,044 km and costing Rs 11,588 crore have been commissioned. Rest 27 projects will be completed by December 2021 while remaining 2 projects will be handed over by March 2022.
The 68 critical projects of a total length of 6,913 km with a cost of Rs 75,736 crore are those requiring completion in next stage and are all civil works involving related electrification and signalling. Of these 68 projects, 4 of them with 108 km length and costing Rs 1,408 crore have been completed till date. The balance projects are targeted to be completed by March 2024.
The key capacity building projects which have been delivered cut across states of Assam, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand. In Assam, the railways has commissioned second line track on Naranarayan setu on Brahmaputra river of the New Bongaigaon-Guwahati section. In West Bengal, part of two doubling projects i.e. Katwa- Bazar Sau and Azimganj-Bazar Sau has been commissioned.
The doubling of this line is important in view of traffic moving from Burdwan to/fro Sahibganj for movement of coal for Farakka Super Thermal Power Station and Katwa Super Thermal Power Station which us under construction.
In Maharashtra, a super critical project, Bhusaval-Jalgaon 3rd line, has been commissioned to remove bottleneck in the the Mammad-Khandwa and Bhusaval-Udhna section and in Uttarakhand, the doubling of Haridwar-Laksar section has been commissioned. With this, the entire route from national capital New Delhi to Haridwar via Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Roorkee has become a double line which will improve punctuality on this busy route.
