New Delhi: Minister of Railways and Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal has said that Indian Railways would need capital investment of around Rs 50 lakh crore up to 2030 for network expansion and capacity augmentation.

The investment will also be needed for rolling stock induction and other modernization works to enable better delivery of passenger and freight services and to improve its modal share in transport.

To bridge the gap in capital funding and to induce modern technologies and improve efficiencies, the Ministry of Railways planning to use the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model for a few initiatives. One of the PPP initiatives is to invite private players to invest and induct modern rakes over select routes to provide world class services to the passengers.

“As part of this initiative, Ministry of Railways has issued 12 Requests for Qualification (RFQs) on July 1, 2020 for operation of passenger trains over approximately 109 origin-destination pairs (divided into 12 clusters) through PPP on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) basis. The routes are spread across the entire Indian Railway network,” Goyal informed the Lok Sabha on September 17 in a written reply.

“However, the responsibility of train operations and safety certification rests with Indian Railways in all such cases,” he said. “As of now, no regular passenger train service, running over Indian Railways, is being operated by private operators,” added Goyal.