Indian Railways' smart initiatives can raise GDP by 2%: Suresh Prabhu

Initiatives helping railways to come out with new products to serve diverse range of travellers

Last Updated : Jun 07 2017 | 12:27 PM IST

The smart initiatives undertaken by the Indian Railways during the past two and a half years to increase revenue, especially non-fare revenue, augment capacity and increase operational efficiencies to lower costs in a passenger and business friendly manner has the potential of raising the country’s GDP by 2 percentage points, according to Railway Minister, Suresh Prabhu.

Speaking at FICCI’s Smart Railway Conclave yesterday, Prabhu said, “To make this significant contribution to GDP a reality, the railways were working towards improving its finances and operational aspects in a transparent manner besides providing a better travel experience to the customers.”

Indian Railways had brought out a white paper, after Suresh Prabhu assumed the office as Railway Minister, which identified the challenges. This has helped Railways in creating a strategic plan to address them. “Strenuous efforts were now being made to augment the speed of implementation of policies, redressal of customers’ grievances in real-time and modernisation of processes and systems with the help of technology,” said Prabhu.

For years, there has been a huge gap between the demand and the creation of new infrastructure. The demand for railway infrastructure and amenities has increased exponentially but infrastructure had failed to keep pace. By undertaking smart initiatives aided by the use of technology, the railways were now coming out with new products to serve the diverse range of travellers and projects catering to all classes and categories of travellers.

“The immediate smart strategy of the railways was to focus on new products, tariff rationalisation and policy reforms for demand stimulation, expansion of the commodity basket, nurturing of customers and adoption of new delivery models to bring down the unit cost of operations. For a sustainable growth of the railways, the emphasis was on mega capacity development, high speed rail, station development, doubling, multiple lines, terminals, port connectivity projects and setting up of three more Dedicated Freight Corridors,” explained Mohd. Jamshed, Member Traffic, Railway Board.

According to Nalin Jain, co-chair, FICCI National Committee on Infrastructure, and president & CEO, GE Transportation - Asia Pacific & China, the real challenge before the Indian Railways was to devise ways to gain share of the traffic from the road sector, enhance productivity and manage capital expenditure for capacity expansion and project implementation. “The seeds had been sown for the transformation to ‘smart’ railways by way of a freight action plan, expansion and modernization plan, electrification of 72 percent of BG network by 2020, creation of a dedicated safety fund to achieve a zero-accident mission, ICT deployment and keeping in step with Make in India through the PPP mode and FDI,” he added.