Railway sets up High Speed Rail Corporation

Mumbai-Ahemdabad and Delhi-Amritsar are two of 7 corridors that the corporation will take on a priority basis

Taking a step ahead for higher speed of passenger trains, Railway Minister Malikarjun Kharge today announced the formation of High Speed Rail Corporation (HSRC). HSRC will be a subsidiary of Rail Vikas Nigam Limited. The subsidiary has been set up to boost the speed of the passenger trains up to 200 Km/hr.

RVNL is a Public Sector Undertaking of the Indian Railways.

HSRC in the coming future would have a separate Managing Director. For now the current Chairman and Managing Director of RVNL will take care of the subsidiary. “We will decide upon the related costs, structure and composition of the subsidiary in the coming time,” said Kharge on the sidelines of the High Speed Rail Seminar in Delhi.

Mumbai-Ahemdabad and Delhi-Amritsar are two of seven corridors that the corporation will take on a priority basis. The feasibility of studies of these corridors has been completed. Highlighting the issue of fencing, Kharge noted that setting up high speed rail in India comes with its own set of issues. “We cannot go ahead with the fencing like that in China”, said Kharge.

“Our effort is to utilize the current infrastructure with minimum inputs,” said Chairman Railway Board Arunendra Kumar. Officials from the RVNL pointed out that setting up of HSRC will provide the required flexibility to accelerate the project.

According to Railway Board Chairman, for speed above 200 km/hr needs dedicated tracks and fencing which becomes difficult to execute in Indian scenario. He also stated that in the coming time the focus of Railways would be to achieve speed of train between 160-200 km/hr on the existing tracks.

The formation of HSRC will be followed by the formation of High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) soon. Kumar noted that the HSRC and HSRA will have different functions. The authority will be responsible for policy formation and corporation would be the implementation agency.