Railway Budget socially desirable: Banerjee

Presenting her third Railway Budget in the Parliament, Railway Minister Mamta Banerjee at the very start set the tone of the budget as, economically unviable but socially desirable budget.

The focus of the budget was clearly on upgrading the existing infrastructure and providing better services to passengers. This included quality food, drinking water facility as well as clean toilets for passengers using the Indian Railways.

Along with this 50 stations would be developed as world class stations some of these include, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Howrah, Bhubhaneswar, New Delhi, Kanpur, Chennai, Bangalore, Tiruvanthapuram, and Jaipur. These will be developed on the basis of public private partnership (PPP).

Moreover, of the 375 stations 309 have been identified for further development.

To make travelling accessible to all the sections of the society, 50 mobile vans would be introduced in both urban and rural areas for making booking easy for commuters. Passengers can also now buy reserved tickets from 5,000 Post Offices

The budget also said that an expert panel will be set up to look into rail optic fibre network. The budget also marked plan to introduce AC double trains for inter-city travel.

Banerjee also said that the railways will acquire 18,000 wagons during the current fiscal. The announcement will be beneficial to firms like BEML, Texmaco, Kalindee Rail Nirman, Container Corp among others.