Indian Railways: 150 Private trains to run on 100 routes

Indian Railways has selected 100 routes to run 150 private passenger train rakes and bids for the routes are likely to be invited next month, a senior railway official has told ET Magazine.

With finance ministry’s Public Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) giving in-principal approval to the proposal on December 19, the path has been cleared for the railways to roll out its reform in engaging private operators, ending its long monopoly in running passenger trains.

The official, who did not want to be named, said the major long-distance routes identified for bidding include Mumbai-Kolkata, Mumbai-Chennai, Mumbai-Guwahati, New Delhi-Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram-Guwahati, New Delhi-Kolkata, New Delhi-Bengaluru, New Delhi-Chennai, Kolkata-Chennai and Chennai-Jodhpur.

Other prominent routes include Mumbai-Varanasi, Mumbai-Pune, Mumbai-Lucknow, Mumbai-Nagpur, Nagpur-Pune, Secunderabad-Visakhapatnam, Patna-Bengaluru, Pune-Patna, Chennai-Coimbatore, Chennai-Secunderabad, Surat-Varanasi and Bhubaneswar-Kolkata. Some routes connecting New Delhi to Patna, Allahabad, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Katra, Gorakhpur, Chhapra and Bhagalpur have also been selected.

Commercial viability seems to be the key yardstick in picking the routes. Thirty-five of the 100 routes will connect to New Delhi, 26 to Mumbai, 12 to Kolkata, 11 to Chennai and eight to Bengaluru, all metropolitan cities.

Some of the proposed non-metro routes include Gorakhpur-Lucknow, Kota-Jaipur, Chandigarh-Lucknow, Visakhapatnam-Tirupati and Nagpur-Pune.

When contacted, Railway Board Chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav confirmed the railways is identifying routes for private trains. “PPPAC has already cleared the Railways’ proposal of inviting bids from private players to run 150 trains. The bids will be invited soon, maybe in 10-15 days. It will be a milestone for Indian Railways,” Yadav told ET Magazine.

He said the introduction of private trains along with the government’s move to restructure the Railway Board will have long-term spinoffs in the way the national transporter functioned. He refused to give more details.

ET Magazine, in its September 22 edition, was the first to report that Indian Railways was planning to induct 150 private trains. In the second week of October, Indian Railways set up an empowered committee of secretaries under NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant to examine the proposal. Railway Board chairman, secretaries at the department of economic affairs and ministry of housing & urban affairs and three senior railway officials are members of the panel.

Since then, the group has met five times, indicating the urgency of the plan to induct private trains. “Indian Railways has decided to engage three to four private operators for running trains designed to move at a maximum speed of 160 kmph. Private operators will be allowed to choose their technology and determine the fare,” the senior railway official said.

Names of the private players interested in bidding for the routes will likely be known at a stakeholders’ meeting scheduled for December 31 in New Delhi. The empowered group of secretaries has also given a go-ahead to the modernisation of several railway stations. Nagpur, Gwalior, Amritsar and Sabarmati were bid out last week, for an indicative development cost of Rs 1,300 crore, the official said.