The new railway budget invites both, bouquets and brickbats. Bouquets for sparing passengers of any further increase in fare. And brickbats for inviting private domestic and FDI in infrastructure projects to boost the revenues of the cash strapped railways. The budget professed private-public partnership to bring the loss running largest public sector in India back on track.

 

The left castigate the budget as a step towards privatizing railways.

 

Having increased fares to the tune of 14.2 per cent recently, railway minister Sadananda Gowda, who presented the Modi government's first budget in Lok Sabha, said he charts out plans to leverage railway PSU resources by bringing in their investible funds in infrastructure projects.

The following are the highlights of the railway :

 

* Receipts in 2014-15 estimated at Rs.164,374 crore, expenditure at Rs.149,176 crore

 

* Fare revision will bring in Rs.8,000 crore; need another Rs.9,000 crore for the diamond quadrilateral project

 

* Receipts in 2013-14 were Rs.139,550 crore; expenditure was Rs.130,321 crore

 

* Spent 94 paise of every rupee earned, leaving a surplus of only 6 paise

 

* Twenty three railway projects underway in the northeast; Rs.5,116 crore allocated for this in 2014-15 – a jump of 54 percent from the previous fiscal

 

* Diamond quadrilateral to be launched for high-speed trains; Rs.100 crore allocated for taking project forward

 

* First bullet train to run on Mumbai-Ahmedabd route

 

* Trains on select routes to be speeded up to 160-200 km per hour

 

* Ticketing to be further modernised to issue 7,200 tickets per minute

 

* Dedicated freight corridor projects to be closely monitored

 

* Social service obligations of the railways rose from 9.4 percent of gross traffic receipts in 2000-01 to 16.6 percent in 2010-11; in 2012-13 these stood at Rs 20,000 crore.

 

* Would require Rs.5 lakh crores in 10 years for ongoing projects

 

* In the past, focus was on sanctioning projects rather than completing them; in the past 30 years, 676 projects worth Rs.157,883 crore sanctioned, of which 317 completed and 359 incomplete and would require Rs.182,000 crore

 

* It is estimated that over Rs.40,000 crore would be needed for track renewal, elimination of unmanned railway crossings and for road-under and road-over bridges.

 

* To strengthen security in trains and at stations, 17,000 RPF constables have been recruited; 4,000 women constables to also be recruited. RPF teams in trains to be provided mobile phones.

 

* Railways to interact with industry to attract investment in PPP mode through BOT and Annuity route; 8-10 capacity augmentation projects on congested routes to be identified for this

 

* Port connectivity taken up on priority in PPP mode

 

* Fifty eight new trains, among them five Jan Sadharan trains, five premium trains and six AC express trains to be introduced; run of 11 trains to be extended

 

* Special festival trains to continue

 

* Banihal-Katra link in Jammu and Kashmir to be taken up; in the interim, a bus system has been introduced to enable travel to Srinagar on a single ticket

 

* Wi-Fi at select stations and on some trains

 

* Paperless railway offices in five years

 

* Indian Railways hold vast land assets which need to be digitised and GIS mapped for better management and usage; resource mobilisation using land assets will be explored through PPP mode

 

* Innovation Incubation Centre to be set up

 

* Pre-cooked ready-to-eat meals to be introduced

 

* Food courts to be set up at major stations to provide regional flavour; pilot project on New Delhi-Amritsar and New Delhi-Jammu Tawi routes

 

* Forty percent increase in expenditure on cleanliness; CCTVs to monitor cleanliness at stations; cleaning activities at 50 major stations to be outsourced to professional agencies; separate housekeeping wing to be set up; onboard housekeeping services on 400 trains appreciated

 

* Special train on teachings of Swami Vivekananda

 

* Railways backbone of supply chain of defence establishment

 

* Carry one billion tonnes of freight every year; target to become largest freight carrier in the world

 

* Decline in traffic growth in 2013-14

 

* With 12,500 trains, railways move 23 million passengers every day; equivalent to moving Australia's population