There is no proposal to privatise the Indian Railways, said Minister of Railways, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha on Friday.
It is estimated that the Railway Infrastructure would need an investment of Rs. 50 lakh crores between 2018-2030. Therefore, to bridge the gap in the capital funding, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) mode is envisaged to facilitate faster development of network, manufacturing of rolling stocks and delivery of passenger and freight services, a PIB release read.
There is also a proposal to use PPP mode for inducting modern rakes to run passenger trains on select routes with an objective to provide improved service delivery to passengers. However, the responsibility of train operations and safety certification rests with Indian Railways in all such cases.
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The Ministry of Railways (MoR) has invited bids for induction of approximately 150 pairs of passenger train services to be operated over select routes through Public Private Partnership (PPP). These train services shall be additional, aimed at increasing the availability of services to the public.
In view of the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, the bid opening due date for RFP (Requests for Proposal) stage has been rescheduled to July 23, 2021.
All existing employees will be retained in the above proposal and there will be no layoffs, the release added.
Apart from this, the Indian Railways (IR) has decided to undertake electrification of Broad Gauge (BG) Railway lines in mission mode. Significant progress has already been made in this regard and IR is likely to electrify all BG rail lines by 2023-24. As on 01.04.2020, the total length of entire Indian railways network (all Gauges) stands at 67,956 Route kilometre.