Indian Railways: First set of private trains likely by March 2023

With several corporate houses including Bombardier India, Bharat Forge and GMR group showing interest to operate private passenger trains, Indian Railways is hoping to start the first set of 12 trains by March 2023.

As per Indian Railways' plan, the tenders will be finalised by March 2021 and trains will operate from March 2023, said an official from the Railways Ministry.

As the railways proposes to allow private players to operate 151 trains, the first set of 12 are expected to start operation by March 2023, followed by 45 more in 2024-25 financial year, another 50 in 2025-26 and the remaining 44 in 2026-27.

A total of 16 private companies' representatives including GMR group, Bombardier India, Spanish coach and component maker CAF, IRCTC, Medha Group, RK Associates, Bharat Forge and JKB Infrastructure, PSUs RITES and Bharat Heavy Electricals have participated in the first pre-bid meeting conducted by railways on Tuesday. The second such meeting will be held in second week of August.

Earlier, the railways formally kickstarted its plans to allow private entities to operate passenger trains on its network by inviting request for qualifications (RFQ) for participation on 109 pairs of routes through 151 modern trains.

In 2019, a total of 8.4 billion passengers travelled in trains while the number will be 30 billion by 2030. Keeping with demand, the railways will continue to introduce new trains, the ministry said.

"Indian Railways network is about 68,000 route kilometers. In the year 2018-19, the reserved passenger volume was 16% (0.59 billion) of the total originating non- suburban passengers (3.65 billion). Almost 8.85 crore of waitlisted passengers could not be accommodated," said the official from the railways.

During pre-lockdown period IRCTC, the catering and ticketing arm of railways operated three trains-New Delhi-Lucknow, Mumbai -Ahmedabad and Ujjain-Varanasi. Since all the three trains operated successfully with occupancy more than 70%, the railways wanted to hand over more routes to private companies, said the official.