Railways spent Rs 1 trillion on renewing safety assets: Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister of Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday said that the railways have spent more than Rs 1 trillion on the renewal and upgradation of critical safety assets in the last five years. The amount includes Rs 65,000 crore from gross budgetary support (GBS) and a balance of Rs 40,378 crore from internal and extra-budgetary resources by the Ministry of Railways.

Vaishnaw provided this information in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha on Friday.

From 2018-19 to 2022-23, the railway ministry undertook a gross expenditure of Rs 1,05,378 crore on Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) works. The fund has been extended for another five-year term from 2022-23 with a GBS of Rs 45,000 crore.

RRSK was introduced in 2017-18 for the upgradation of critical safety assets with a corpus of Rs 1 trillion for five years.

The minister stated in Rajya Sabha that the outlay for Budget Estimate (BE) 2023-24 is Rs 29,325 crore. The ministry's total expenditure of Rs 1,22,865 crore was funded to the extent of Rs 78,501 crore from GBS and the balance from internal generation and extra-budgetary resources. The actual expenditure on the replacement of assets in 2022-23 is Rs 26,855 crore. For 2021-22, the expenditure was Rs 28,517. In 2020-21, the amount spent was Rs 28,529 crore.

The ministry began a system of Memorandum of Meeting (MoM) in financial year 2023-24 (FY24) for greater transparency in capital investments. The MoM was intended to bind the Railway Board, the top decision-making body of the national transporter, to plan how it would spend the Rs 2.4 trillion provided in Budget FY24 for capex. The Railways got the largest share of the approximately Rs 10 trillion the Budget provided for capex.