The East Coast Railway (ECoR) has sought investments from the prospective investors for speedy execution of rail connectivity projects through public private partnership route.
The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) in November last year had approved a proposal from the Union ministry of Railways for a policy framework for private participation in rail connectivity and capacity augmentation projects.
For familiarizing the policy, the regional railway has organized an interactive session with the officials of state government, major rail users and potential investors.
Keeping in view the huge potential of originating traffic on Indian Railways and ECoR in particular, the objective of the interactive session was to impress upon the prospective investors to invest in development of rail network to facilitate faster construction of fixed rail hardware so that suitable infrastructure is put in place in time for carriage of their traffic, read an ECoR release.
The policy contains five models, namely, non-government railway, joint venture (JV) model, railway projects on BOT award through competitive bidding, capacity augmentation by doubling or laying of 3rd line or 4th line etc with funding provided by customers and annuity model.
In the interactive session , G.C. Ray, chief transport planning manager, ECoR brought out the salient features of the models and its advantages including revenue sharing arrangements for the investors.
The participative meeting was attended by all major customers of Railways including officials from Mahanadi Coal Fields limited (MCL), NTPC Ltd, National Aluminum Company limited, Paradeep Port, Dhamra Port etc. Officials of Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (Idco) and state Transport and Commerce department also attended the meeting.
