The coaches have route map displays, CCTVs, overhead luggage racks, mobileand laptop-charging sockets, double-glazed safety glass windows, fire and smoke detectors et al. One of the six coaches is for business class passengers —with more legroom, reclining seats and entry from a special lounge in the platform. As many as 30 such train sets will be deployed in the Delhi-Meerut corridor of the Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS), the first-ofits-kind rapid rail venture in India for suburban commuters, a part of which (17 km) is expected to be rolled out in March.
However, none of these facilities — the Duhai depot, the new train sets, or the newly built rail corridor — belongs to the Indian Railways. They are administered by the National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC), a joint venture company of the government of India and Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. It is under the administrative control of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA). While NCRTC has been working on three RRTS corridors — Delhi-Meerut (82 km), DelhiAlwar (198 km) and Delhi-Panipat (103 km) — there have been talks of extending some of those routes to cities such as Jaipur and Chandigarh.
With MoHUA anchoring an ever expanding metro rail network and the soonto-be launched regional rail, the Indian Railways is losing its monopoly on running trains in large parts of India. The trend will be more noticeable in the coming years as urban rail networks up to 100-150 km beyond city limits are being designed and implemented. According to recent data, the length of total approved metro rail and RRTS lines is 1,835 km — all outside the control of the Ministry of Railways. About 824 km of metro lines are functional in 20 cities. The Railways still owns 68,000 km of rail routes of which 54,000 km were built during the Raj.
NCRTC MD Vinay Kumar Singh tells ET that he has been receiving enquiries from various state governments on RRTS, an indication that the regional rail network may expand on a grand scale in the near future. “The Haryana government is planning such a system between Faridabad and Gurugram. One more RRTS is being planned between Lucknow and Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Another such route may come up between Hyderabad and Vijayawada,” says Singh, adding that the government of Rajasthan has written a letter to the Centre, urging that the RRTS corridor be extended to Jaipur, a distance of 250 km from Delhi’s Sarai Kale Khan, which will be a hub for all three corridors.
The runaway train
With the entire Delhi-Meerut corridor likely to be operational by mid-2025 and preliminary work in the Delhi-Alwar route kicking off, several officials in Rail Bhawan do not appear to be upbeat about these developments. “It is okay for another ministry to handle metro rail projects within a city. But now rail lines are being built far beyond city limits and parallel to what we are mandated to do. The Railways could have executed RRTS at half the cost by constructing viaducts over existing tracks,” says a senior railway official, requesting anonymity.
For the Rs 30,274 crore Delhi-Meerut project, which includes a component of the Meerut Metro, the cost per kilometre is about Rs 370 crore. It is similar to what the Delhi Metro is spending per kilometre in its ongoing phase IV project (about Rs 24,000 crore for 65 km). Had the Railways taken up the RRTS project, it could have worked out cheaper as there would have been little additional land acquisition liabilities.
Officially, the railway ministry has not locked horns with NCRTC’s endeavours, unlike in 2006-07 when the ministry opposed the Centre’s move to give freedom to metro rail companies in choosing gauge, technologies, et al. On safety matters, both metro rail companies and the NCRTC need permission from the Commission of Railway Safety, which comes under the Ministry of Civil Aviation. While metro rail companies are mandated to send their designs to the Research Design and Standards Organization (RDSO), under the railway ministry, the NCRTC is exempted from it.
Incidentally, the need to build RRTS was first spotted by a study commissioned by the Ministry of Railways way back in 1998-99. The papers were gathering dust till they were handed over to the National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) in 2006 against the backdrop of the Delhi Metro’s extension to peripheral towns. That was when the RRTS project slipped out of the railway ministry’s hands. The erstwhile Planning Commission had also formed a task force on the subject. The NCRTC was incorporated in 2013, with a mandate to spearhead the intercity project outside the administrative control of the Ministry of Railways.
NVS Reddy, a former railway officer and MD of Hyderabad Metro, says building an RRTS outside the railway system is a wise decision:
“It’s high time the monopoly of Indian Railways ended and the rail sector across the country opened up to state governments and even the private sector in PPP (public private partnership) mode.”
For NCRTC’s Singh, the railway ministry officials are feeling bad not because someone else is operating short-distance trains but because newer technologies are happening outside their ministry.
“Our signalling system (ETCS level 2), for example, is better than what is being deployed in Europe,” he claims.
Former railway board chairman VK Yadav insists that the RRTS is not a priority for the Indian Railways. “The Indian Railways is looking for passengers who travel long distance. The priority for the Railways is to run long-distance trains connecting metro cities, at 160 kmph, and regional trains, at 130 kmph, for which track upgrade is currently on,” he says. Yadav adds that the RRTS is founded on an idea that people should continue to reside in peripheral towns and commute daily to work in a big city, something that can be executed better by an urban entity.
Gauge the change
Urban transport became a separate subject only in 1986, coming under the then ministry of urban development, says OP Agarwal, who had authored, as a joint secretary at the Centre, India’s national urban transport policy of 2006. He says urban rail systems must not be clubbed under the generic category of railways “just because both the railway systems (urban and long-distance) use steel wheels on steel tracks”. “The Indian Railways had taken up the Kolkata metro, but it took them more than two decades to complete the project (just 17 km). And when the idea of a metro in Delhi gained momentum, the Indian Railways was even unwilling to take it up,” he adds.
Twenty-seven years after the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation was created as a 50:50 venture between the Union urban affairs ministry and the Delhi government, a move that ushered in a metro revolution across the country, the railway ministry is bound to introspect on what it has missed and what it may still lose out on. If the idea of regional rail gains momentum and if it is expeditiously built around every big city, then the Ministry of Railways will find itself in a precarious position. And a day may arise when the Indian Railways will no longer be the lord of the rail in India.
