Over Rs 35,000 cr investment in Railways through PPP

Investment of over Rs 35,000 crore has been committed for various projects through public-private partnership in Railways, the Lok Sabha was informed today.

Some of the areas identified by Railways for investment through the PPP route are building last mile connectivity for ports/mines/industrial clusters, setting up of manufacturing units for rolling stock, building Private Freight Terminals (PFT), procurement of wagons, private operation of containers trains and redevelopment of stations among others, Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain said in a written reply to a question.

He said till now investment of more than Rs 35,000 crore has been committed for projects in these areas.

The target of Extra-Budgetary Resources through Partnership for 2016-17 is Rs 18,340 crore. No projection of funds has been made for 2017-18 and 2018-19.

However, in the Budget 2015-16, it was announced that investments would be stepped with a plan to spend Rs 8.56 lakh crore in next 5 years (2015-2019) which envisaged approximately 15 percent through PPP, he said.

As per the Twelfth Five-Year Plan Document (2012-2017) issued by the erstwhile Planning Commission, 25 percent of the total Eleventh Plan Investments of Railways came from Extra-Budgetary Resources.

Precise mobilisation from private investment has not been compiled for the period by Railways. Also, since different sectors have different characteristics, the figures are not comparable.

Railways has taken several policy measures to attract private investment such as new Participative Policy for capacity augmentation, issuing sectoral guidelines for Domestic/Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), preparing Model Concession Agreements (MCAs) for PPP models, liberalising Private Freight Terminal (PFT) policy, Station redevelopment policy, setting up Loco manufacturing units through PPP.