A total route length of 1,610
km,799 km of Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor and 811 km of Western Dedicated
Freight Corridor has been completed out of the overall 2,843 km of the
Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFCs) till October 2022, the Minister of Railways,
Ashwini Vaishnaw, informed the Lok Sabha on December 22.
Indian Railways’ mega
infrastructure project, the Dedicated Freight Corridor, comprises the Western
Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC, from Dadri to Jawaharlal Nehru Port, 1,506
km) and Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC, from Ludhiana to Sonnagar,
1,337 km) totaling 2,843 route km.
The corridors connecting North and
South and East and West remains in deep freeze by the Railways for the past ten
years. The North South Corridor starts at Itarsi in central India to Vijaywada
and three major ports owned by the center in Tamil Nadu would have no access to
it. Most of the railway infrastructure projects be it bullet trains or vande
bharat trains, strengthening of railway tracks modern signaling system are
confined to western and Northern parts of the country according to EXIM
Industry sources.
South is not on the
radar of railway board for the past several decades.
The Minister also highlighted that
the Joint Parcel Product (JPP) has been launched by the Railways in
collaboration with India Post, which aims to target the business-to-customer
(B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) market with focus on e-commerce and MSMEs.
Under the ‘JPP’, India Post provides first & last mile services, and Indian
Railways provides the middle mile services.
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