Cabinet clears ₹13,041 crore rail, highway projects

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday approved four railway track-quadrupling projects on the Howrah-Chennai high-density network and one highway project in Bihar, worth ₹13,041 crore.

The Howrah-Chennai route is among the country’s most heavily used rail corridors, along with the Mumbai-Chennai, Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes, Union minister for information and broadcasting Ashwini Vaishnaw said.

The four projects, covering eight districts across West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, will expand the existing Indian Railways network by about 410 kilometres.

The proposed multi-tracking projects will enhance connectivity to approximately 6,448 villages, which have a population of about 6 million, a cabinet statement said.

Vaishnaw said India’s major rail routes, including the ones cited above and the Mumbai-Howrah and the Delhi-Chennai, make up only 11% of the country’s rail routes by distance but account for 40% of the traffic.

“If we look at India’s rail network, the Delhi-Howrah, Howrah-Chennai, Chennai-Mumbai, and the Mumbai-Delhi, as well as the diagonal routes from Delhi to Chennai and Mumbai to Howrah, along with the line extending from Howrah to Guwahati, these seven routes are about 11% of the route, but they take 40% of the traffic. That is why these lines are very important,” Vaishnaw said.

“That is why these routes are all being expanded, quadrupled,” he said.

Project details

One of the rail projects approved on Wednesday is the quadrupling of the Cuttack-Paradeep route, which would connect the Paradeep port on India's eastern coast to the Howrah-Chennai network. The ₹2,286 crore project would add 12 million tonnes of freight traffic each year, Vaishnaw said.

Similarly, the Gummidipundi-Gudur quadrupling of railway lines ( ₹2,229 crore) will add 21.24 million tonnes of cargo traffic each year, while the quadrupling of the Bhadrak-Haridaspur line ( ₹1,583 crore) would add 29 million tonnes per annum of additional freight. The Kharagpur-Bhadrak line ( ₹3,352 crore) is the fourth line to be quadrupled under the proposal.

The push for rail infrastructure is intended to improve container movement to ports, enhance multimodal logistics, address the high saturation of existing rail routes, prepare for rising demand, and improve access to religious and tourist destinations, showed the cabinet presentation on Wednesday.

The proposed capacity enhancement will improve rail connectivity to several prominent tourist destinations across the country, including Kuldiha Wildlife Sanctuary, Bhitarkanika National Park, Maa Bhadrakali temple, Maa Dhamarai temple, Panchalingeswar Temple, Talsari-Udaypur and Chandipur Beach, Pulicat Lake, Nelapattu Bird Sanctuary, Lord Veeraraghava Perumal Temple, Gada Kujanga Jagannath Temple, Sarala Temple, Dhabaleswar Temple, Lalitgiri (a Buddhist site), among others, a cabinet statement said.

The cabinet also approved a four-lane highway between Muzaffarpur and Sonbarsa in Bihar, worth ₹3,591 crore, to be built under the Hybrid Annuity Model in 30 months. This 82-km-long highway is expected to reduce travel time between the two places from 2 hours to 1 hour and to connect religious destinations in the region.