
Budget 2025 | Railways eyes a big boost for faster trains, safer tracks and a wider network

Summary
- The Indian Railways anticipates a big budget boost as it looks to accelerate the expansion of new lines for semi-high-speed trains such as Vande Bharat.
New Delhi: Indian Railways is preparing itself for a big increase in budgetary allocations for laying new train tracks as part of efforts to modernize the network, deploy fast trains and make rail travel safer.
The plan is to raise allocations for new tracks to over ₹50,000 crore in FY26, a 50% increase over budgeted expenditure for FY25, according to two persons aware of the development.
Higher allocation will allow Railways to augment its network especially in high congestion areas and between cities that have seen rapid growth in both road traffic and economy.
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Faster development of new lines, including gauge conversion, doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of lines in certain sectors is required to expand the network coverage of semi-high-speed trains such as Vande Bharat. These trains will need better and stronger tracks to move at speeds of up to 200 km per hour.
In FY25 (in the first nine-month period up to December 2024), capacity augmentation has been the biggest head for investment by the Railways. Of the ₹2.52 trillion allotted to the ministry from Central government coffers, ₹81,713 crore has been spent on capacity augmentation.
New vision
Laying the new tracks is part of a new vision 2047 document for the national transporter, under which it expects add 100,000 km of new alignments, including replacements, over the next 25 years costing ₹15-20 trillion. Broken down, this plan targets laying 25,000 km of new tracks over the next five years with an investment of over ₹3.5 trillion, alongside a yearly goal of laying 5,000-5,500 km of new lines.
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“The Railways should stop investing money in uneconomic ventures, for example electrification of lines which is not economically justified, to improve its operating ratio and focus investment on essential and economic infrastructure development projects. The ministry of railways should also look at the possibility of fast-tracking public private partnership (PPP) projects to foster private investments. PPP is a proven model which has worked well in the Indian scenario," said Shailesh Agarwal, partner, risk consulting, EY India.
As part of its infrastructure focus, railways which added 14,985 km of railway tracks between 2004-14, raised the pace 2.08 times to 31,180 km between 2014-24.
Moving costs
At current prices, laying 1 km of tracks costs around ₹15 crore. This could vary depending on the movement of prices of basic inputs such as steel as well as the availability of land for laying tracks.
For its key infrastructure plan, the railways is expecting the Centre to continue to maintain or slightly increase the level of gross budgetary in FY26. For FY24, the Centre provided a record gross budgetary support (GBS) of ₹2.4 trillion, a 51% increase over gross budgetary supportrof ₹1.59 trillion (revised estimates) in FY23. For FY25, the GBS has been raised further to ₹2.52 trillion, which the railways feels should be maintained to enable the national transporter to carry out infrastructure projects.
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The railways' focus on expanding its network is in line with projected growth in rail traffic both passenger and freight. As per a ministry of railways study, currently Indians undertake 8 billion trips by rail, 2-2.5 billion trips by road and around 350 billion trips by air every year. These 8 billion trips are estimated to grow manifolds by 2030 so capacity augmentation is required by the railways.