Union Budget 2021: In this budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman can announce the expansion of high-speed rail network. Also, Railways can get the highest capital so far as capital expenditure for the new financial year. Railways have been working on several other ambitious projects for a long period.
New Delhi. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is going to present the budget for the financial year 2021-22 on 1 February. In this budget, the Finance Minister can give information about the expansion of Bullet Train Network in the country. In December last year itself, the Ministry of Railways had released ‘National Rail Plan 2024’ for its long-term strategy. It had information about increasing the railway infrastructure capacity and model share. There was also mention of preparing high-speed railway infrastructure in it. The Ministry had also said that this plan will be finalized by January 2021.
Under the proposed draft plan, by the year 2051, 8,000 km of high-speed rail network will be prepared across the country. It also includes new bullet train corridors. Bullet train corridors are also proposed for Varanasi-Patna, Amritsar-Jammu and Patna-Guwahati routes. Currently, there is only one bullet train corridor in India. It is between Mumbai and Ahmedabad and work is going on on it. However, there is a delay in land acquisition cases. Especially this problem is being seen in Maharashtra.
Other corridors of the bullet train are also proposed between Delhi-Varanasi, Hyderabad-Bengaluru and Mumbai-Nagpur via Ayodhya. In the last general budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that the central government will insist on completing the bullet train project between Mumbai-Ahmedabad quickly.
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Railways can get the highest allocation so far,
apart from this, many major changes are going to happen in the railway infrastructure of the country. In the coming budget, the capital expenditure of the railway for the financial year 2021-22 can reach the highest level ever. In the current financial year, the capex of the Railways was fixed at Rs 1,61,062 crore. If the Finance Ministry accepts the proposals of the Railway Board, then there can be a big increase in it.
Railways spend record on projects in last 6 years
According to the government, there has been a huge increase in the capital expenditure of railways after 2014 to complete the projects hanging in the balance. Under the National Infrastructure Pipeline (PIP) plan, Rs 11.43 lakh crore is to be spent in the railway sector itself by 2024-25. Based on this roadmap, it is expected to spend Rs 3.08 lakh crore in FY 2022 itself. The total capital expenditure of the railways between 2014 and 2020 has been 6 lakh crores. Capital expenditure for 2019 to 2014 was around 50 per cent.
Railways is set to increase its share of freight traffic from the present 30% to 45% by the year 2030.
At present, Railways is spending about Rs 6.75 lakh crore on 498 projects covering 49,069 km. All these projects are in various stages. Of these, 58 projects are considered to be extremely important, while 68 are in the category of critical. In addition, 247 doubling, 198 new lines, 522 traffic facilities and 55 gauge conversion are underway to increase the capacity of passengers and to increase freight traffic.
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