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Dedicated Freight Corridor: Logistics Simplified
Infraline Energy, May 2009, Pages: 16
The Indian railway constitutes a critical component of India’s transport network. Generally it carries passengers and freight. It is cost effective and environment friendly. The Indian railways have 1.4 million employees and 64,000 kilometre-long network. Some inherent problems like capacity constraints and constraints in the freight segment have led to a significant shift from railways to road transport. However, the railways are poised for rapid growth in capacity expansion in recent future.
The high density eastern and western corridors are already saturated in terms of line capacity utilization. The economic growth of India has put a huge pressure on the network and increased congestion in these routes.
As freight is a major source of revenue to railways, there is a necessity of drawing a roadmap for the construction and operation of the dedicated freight corridors. The committee on infrastructure in its report proposed for a corporate entity which would provide the rail infrastructure, but would not engage in freight business, thus providing non discriminatory access on payment of haulage charges by train operators. The committee is of the view that it would help large scale private investment and competition in freight operations.
So, freight is the area where the Railways need to concentrate upon from the point of view of revenue. Around 55 per cent of the freight traffic is accounted for by coal, iron ore and steel. Since the revenue per-tonne-km is almost the same for most commodities, except iron ore and steel, this means the Railways need to look for new categories of freight (those being freighted by road) if they want additional revenues. This is where the role of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) comes in.
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