Examining PPP Opportunities Across Indian Railways - Tracking New Avenues of Investment Opportunity for Railways Infrastructure Development Till 2025

Inr 50 Lakh Crores of Investment Anticipated Till 2030 Across Indian Railways Segment

Trains will run on 109 identified busy routes with a contract period of 35 years. These private trains shall be designed for a maximum speed of 160km/h and will be of length 384 meters. The selected private players shall be responsible for financing, procuring, operation and maintenance of the new trains, a majority of which will be manufactured in India.

As many as 23 firms have shown interest, including major players such as Medha Infracon, Alstom Transport, Bharat Forge, Sterlite Power, IRCTC, Titagarh Wagons, Bombardier Transportation, BEML, GMR Infrastructure, Hind Rectifiers Limited, Megha Engineering & Infrastructure, JKB Infrastructure, Gateway Rail, Jasan Infra Pvt Limited, RK Associates & Hoteliers, PSCG Technologies, L&T Infra Development, ISQ, Asia Infrastructure Investments, Siemens Ltd and NIIFL.

In July 2020, GoI has issued RFQs for operation of passenger trains in 12 regional clusters through PPP on DBFO basis with an approximate cost of INR 30,000 crores. For these private trains, the routes are divided into 12 clusters based out of major city centres, such as Patna, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Prayagraj, Howrah, Chennai, Chandigarh, and two each for Delhi and Mumbai. Each cluster is an independent business project, inviting a private player to manage.

The indicative project cost of the Delhi-2 cluster is INR 2,329 crore. It has 12 origin-destination pairs as routes, and the average distance of the routes is around 925 km. Each cluster has an indicative project cost and average train distance of 900-1052 km.