Indian Railways records best ever cargo loading in August’22

Indian Railways has recorded best ever August Monthly freight loading of 119.32 MT in August’22. The incremental loading in the month of August has been 8.69 MT i.e. a growth of 7.86 % over the previous best August figures achieved in 2021. With this, Indian Railways has had 24 straight months of best ever monthly freight loading.

IR has achieved an incremental loading of 9.2 MT in Coal, followed by 0.71 MT in Fertilizer, 0.68 MT in Balance other goods and 0.62 MT Containers. Increase in automobile loading has been another highlight of Freight Business in FY 2022-23 and 2206 rakes have been loaded in FY 2022-23 till August as compared to 1314 rakes during the same period of last year i.e. a growth of 68%.

The cumulative freight loading from 1st April’2022 to 31st August ’2022 has been 620.87 MT as against 562.75 MT achieved in 2021-22 i.e. an incremental loading of 58.11 MT, with a growth of 10.32 % over same period last year.

The freight NTKMs (Net tonne kilometers) have increased from 63 Billion in August ’21 to 73 Billion in August’22 registering a growth of 16 %. The cumulative NTKMs in the first five months have also grown by 18.29 %.

 

Railways/Photo:en.wikipedia.org

The sustained efforts of Indian Railways to increase supply of Coal to Power houses, in close coordination with Ministry of Power and Coal, have been one of the key features of the freight performance in the month of August. The loading of Coal (both domestic and imported) to Power Houses has increased by 10.46 MT in August with 44.64 MT Coal being moved to Power houses as against 34.18 MT last year, i.e. a growth of 31%. Cumulatively, in the first five months of the year, IR has loaded more than 58.41 MT extra coal to Power Houses as compared to same period of last year, with a growth of more than 32%.

The commodity wise growth number show that IR has achieved impressive growth in almost all commodity segments with the following growth rates :

Indian Railways comes to the rescue of Bangalore traffic jams

In view of increasing bumper-to-bumper slow-moving Bangalore traffic during the peak hours, Indian Railways has come out with a plan to run suburban trains between Bengaluru-Whitefield section, in addition to 26 suburban trains introduced elsewhere in the city in the last one year.

The project, involving Rs 492.87 crore, has been approved for construction. The 25 km stretch will connect six stations–Bengaluru Cantonment, Bengaluru East, Baiyyapannahalli, Krishnarajapuram, Hoodi and Whitefield, to benefit an estimated 62,000 daily commuters in this section, said the railway ministry in a statement.

To be completed by 2021, the project will help to ease the traffic in the burgeoning IT hub area of whitefield. Currently, 146 trains are running from Bengaluru and 94 trains from Yesvantpur stations, and out of them 122 are essentially suburban trains catering the commuters in the vicinity of Bengaluru.

The Railways said four additional suburban services between KSR Bengaluru-Baiyyappanahalli and Baiyappanahalli-Bengaluru have been introduced.

Indian Railways has been on a fast track these days introducing fast and online tendering system for infrastructure and timely settlement of tenders.

"It is once again reiterated that all tenders should be finalised within the normal validity period," wrote the Railway Board to all its production units as well as other departments recently, urging to follow a fixed timeline for execution of every contract.

High Capacity Parcel Vans in Indian Railways

To meet the demand of full vehicle load perishable traffic, Indian Railways has developed High Capacity Parcel Vans (VPs) with a capacity of 23 Tonnes which are attached to passenger carrying trains subject to availability of room in train and operational feasibility. To facilitate transportation of milk through Rail, specially designed High Capacity Milk Tankers having capacity of 44.66 KL are run as Special trains. At present 3 Milk tanker trains are being run of which 2 trains are run by Gujarat Corporative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMFL) from Palanpur to Bhim Sen and other by Mother Dairy from Daund to Baraut.

In addition to this, Indian Railways also run special parcel train consisting of High Capacity Parcel Vans for transportation of fruits in bulk like Mango, Banana, Orange etc. on demand, on a fixed path between specific origin-destination stations. Railways supply rakes for transportation of fruits on indent basis.

For transportation of horticulture produce in container, Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) has procured 98 Ventilated Isolated Containers specially designed for movement of fruits and vegetables.

Indian Railways Pondering ‘Subsidy’ Give Up Scheme on Tickets

Indian Railways wants to emulate the example of “Give it Up” campaign that was behind 1 crore people giving up their subsidized gas connections before it was made mandatory for all those above the income level of Rs.10 lakhs per annum.

A senior railway official said the ministry is pondering the possibility of similar appeal that can dissuade those who can afford to forfeit claim for subsidy in travel tickets.

“Passengers will have the option to forgo either 100 per cent of the subsidy or 50 per cent or to avail of the subsidy. It will be a voluntary decision,” said the official.

The idea surfaced when a passenger Krishen Kher returned Rs.950 subsidy for his trip sending a cheque to online reservation entity IRCTC. It hit upon them that many people may come forward to renounce any subsidy and save the differential amount of the actual fare, which comes to 57 per cent of each ticket and 40% on suburban rail tickets.

The annual subsidy comes to around Rs.30,000 crore for the Railways. “We expect people who are well off to forgo the subsidy, as details of this are already printed on tickets,” said the official.

The ministry has recently roped in the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy on undertaking efforts to reduce its subsidy burden, following the 2015 Bibek Debroy committee report to go corporate way. In 2016-17 Indian Railways had posted its worst ever operating ratio in 16 years at 96.9 per cent.

Another international consultancy has been asked to design a performance index to measure the country’s largest transportation entity and public sector undertaking (PSU) instead of operating ratio.

If performance comes into reckoning, then railways should increase their frequency of trains on profitable routes and limit them on unprofitable routes. Secondly, the government officials and representatives will have to forfeit their subsidized ticket fares for higher class travel.

Many committees had commissions have recommended Indian Railways to go the corporate way but the Indian government is unable to implement them in view of backlash and huge ticket-less travel reported in states such as Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.