North Eastern Railway Witnesses 35 percent Jump in Freight Carrying Capacity

Indian Railways is aggressively ramping up its goods shipment system to facilitate better movement of cargo using train routes. Apart from increasing the speed of regular passenger trains, railways have also been working on infrastructure to boost cargo trains’ speed. The recent efforts have started yielding results and several railways’ zones have recorded a spike in their freight carrying capacity and revenue generation.

In April 2022-23, the North Eastern Railway witnessed a 35.57 percent jump in its freight carrying capacity in comparison to the same period last year. The division carried a record 0.5293 million tonnes of goods last month compared to 0.3904 million tonnes in April 2021. The actual freight carriage was 76.43 percent more than the target for April 2022.

According to a spokesperson of North Eastern Railways, the improved cargo carrying capacity is a result of the efforts of business development units (BDU) set up at divisional headquarters and railway board level for faster decision making. BDU teams contact the businessmen and industrial institutions directly and make arrangements to scale the freight carrying capacity with improvement and expansion of warehousing facilities.

The spokesperson added that freight carrying capacity is likely to up further with full capacity functioning of the Gati Shakti Cargo Terminal at the Asansol division of North Eastern Railways. The Asansol division was the first to come with a Shakti cargo terminal after the publication of ‘Gati Shakti Multi-Modal Cargo Terminal’ (GCT) policy in December 2021.

Under Prime Minister Gati Shakti Yojna, the Indian Railways plans to come up with 500 multi-model cargo terminals. Out of this 100 GCTs will be set up within the next three financial years.

The terminals will be located at places where other modes of transport such as road, waterways, airways, or other means can be integrated with the railway terminal. The project is being developed at a cost of over Rs 50,000 crores, spent by the central government.

Read all the Latest India News here