 "School students pose for selfies before boarding the Patna-Lucknow Vande Bharat train during its flag-off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi via video conferencing from Gujarat's Ahmedabad, at Patna railway station, Tuesday, March 12, 2024 (PTI Photo)")
Ahead of the enforcement of the model code of conduct for Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday flagged off and laid foundation stones for projects worth Rs 1.06 trillion in Gujarat, including railway projects worth Rs 85,000 crore.
The railway projects flagged off include 10 new Vande Bharat train services — a focus area for the Centre in the past two to three years, with close to 400 new trainsets in the offing.
The new Vande Bharat trains will ply between Ahmedabad-Mumbai Central, Secunderabad-Visakhapatnam, Mysuru-Chennai, Patna-Lucknow, New Jalpaiguri-Patna, Puri-Visakhapatnam, Lucknow-Dehradun, Kalaburagi-Sir M Visvesvaraya Terminal (Bengaluru), Ranchi-Varanasi, and Khajuraho- Nizamuddin (New Delhi).
Four Vande Bharat trains have also been extended as part of Tuesday’s inauguration.
The sleeper version of the train is also likely to be rolled out soon, allowing the currently short-distance train to undertake longer journeys.
Modi argued that a substantial amount of work in the railways has been done in consonance with the vision of the Centre, which discontinued the practice of a separate railway Budget and merged it with the Union Budget.
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A landmark day for Indian Railways! Addressing a programme in Ahmedabad. Do watch.https://t.co/z63aIDvWUF
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 12, 2024
Criticising previous governments ahead of elections, Modi said, “Our government has displayed the willpower to bring the railways out of those hellish conditions. Now, railway development is among the priorities of the government,” a government statement quoted the prime minister as saying.
“The transformation of the railways is the guarantee of Viksit Bharat,” Modi said.
While the investment in railways has been at an all-time high and has resulted in major capacity expansion in several areas, congestion woes for the underprivileged and safety concerns — marked especially by the Balasore triple train crash in 2023 — have been highlighted by Opposition leaders and activists.
In the aftermath of multiple major mishaps, the railways implemented the rolling block programme, planning maintenance and repair activities a year in advance to reduce the chances of errors in repairs of crucial rail machinery.
Among other projects, Modi also inaugurated the operations control centre of the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) in Ahmedabad and several completed sections of the Eastern DFC, which go from Punjab to Bihar.
The Eastern DFC, completed in October 2023 after delays of a decade, is expected to ease coal transportation worries in the summer of this year when high power demand typically chokes the railway network as the national transporter ferries most of the coal in India.
The Western DFC continues to face delays and is expected to be completed in 2025.
Modi also laid the foundation stone for the petrochemical complex of Petronet LNG at Dahej worth more than Rs 20,000 crore. The project is expected to help boost hydrogen production and demand for polypropylene.
Apart from the revenue generation potential from the sale of polypropylene, propylene, propane, hydrogen, and ethane, the company believes the plant will also benefit from utilising the ‘cold energy’ of Petronet’s existing terminal at Dahej, making the project energy-efficient.
Gujarat’s Dahej is the largest single-location LNG storage and regasification terminal.
The Petronet terminal processed 647 trillion British thermal units (tBtu) of LNG in the first nine months of 2023-24, as against 532 tBtu in the corresponding period of 2022-23.
With inputs from Subhayan Chakraborty
