Revamp of New Delhi, Mumbai stations on track, outlay pegged at Rs 6,600 cr

In a major push to station redevelopment plans, tenders for upgrading two of the railway stations with the largest footfall in India -- New Delhi and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) in Mumbai --  are expected to be invited within two weeks and may see investment of over Rs 6,600 crore.

On a daily basis when Railway operations are normal, CSMT handles around 1300 local and long-distance trains carrying over a million passengers, while the New Delhi Railway station handles around 200,000 passengers. "The proposals to redevelop New Delhi and Mumbai (CSMT) stations are under consideration of the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) under the Ministry of Finance. Within 10 to 15 days, we will be inviting tenders for these stations," said V K Yadav, chairman of the Railway Board. A source close to the development indicated that investment of around Rs 6,642 crore -- Rs 5,000 crore for New Delhi and Rs 1,642 crore for CSMT -- was expected for both the stations once projects are completed.

All these stations will have airport-like pre-determined user charges on passengers and visitors, as one of the main revenue streams for the concessionaire of the redeveloped stations. This comes close on the heels of 9 companies being shortlisted for the redevelopment of four railway stations – Nagpur, Gwalior, Amritsar and Sabarmati – on a public-private partnership (PPP) model. The companies that were shortlisted include GMR Business and Consultancy, G R Infraprojects, Kalpataru Power Transmission,  Anchorage Infrastructure Investments Holdings, ISQ Asia Infrastructure Investments, Monte Carlo, JKB Infrastructure, Kalyan Toll Infrastructure, Cube Construction Engineering. "We are targeting to finalise these tenders in the next two months time," Yadav said.

Station redevelopment is part of the ambitious Rs 13.68 trillion capital investment lined up by the Indian Railways for the next five years for infrastructure development. "The major projects lined up include the commissioning of the dedicated freight corridor by December 2021, upgrading of high-density networks (HDN) to 130 kilo meter per hour (kmph) by March 2023, doubling and electrification of all HDN and highly utilised networks (HUN) by March 2024 and further upgrading all HDN routes to 160 kmph capacity by March 2025," Yadav added.

Nearly 96 per cent of the Indian Railways traffic moves on around 51 per cent kilometers of its network. Based on traffic density, type of commodity moved and the importance of route from strategic considerations, the projects requiring urgent expansion including those which are already progressing well (expenditure already more than 60 per cent) have been categorized as supercritical projects. The projects requiring completion in next stage have been defined as critical projects. "Around 58 supercritical and 68 critical projects have been identified for resource allocation for throughput enhancement at a faster pace. Supercritical projects are targeted for completion by December 2021 and critical projects by March 2024," he said.