For this initiative, Indian Railways has partnered with Google in this endeavour.
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Tripura’s Left Front government Thursday night criticised Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu for neglecting the northeastern states in the 2016-17 rail budget.
Since not much was announced for the North Eastern region the North East M.Ps Forum criticized the rail budget for the remote and backward region with much less rail connectivity.
” The Railway Budget 2016-17 has also awarded due focus on the creation of freight corridors and has opted for decentralization of decision making at the state level, to expedite development of backward areas in the country”.
Bihar CM also said that fares should have been reduced because the oil prices have gone down in the worldwide market. Thankfully, a host of cost cutting measures helped him end the year with some Rs 8,720 crore savings, which will help him neutralise most of the revenue shortfall this year. Funding of Rs. 1.5 lakh by LIC confirmed over favourable terms over the next five years.
“The budget outlays of both ER and SER have increased over the past year, we have got new projects and we are committed to commission the ongoing projects on time”. For long, Railways has been dependent on freight traffic to generate revenue as passenger fares remained nearly static as government after government refused to touch them fearing a political backlash. “A policy in this regard would be issued in the next three months”, he added. The railways also enhanced capacity of e-ticketing system from 2,000 tickets per minute to 7,200 tickets per minute and to support 1,20,000 concurrent users as against only 40,000 earlier.
From poems of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Harivansh Rai Bachchan to teachings of Gautam Buddha, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu referred to these all as he presented his second Rail Budget in the Lok Sabha today.
Nalin Jain, president & CEO, GE Transportation said if without increasing freight pricing revenues can be grown then it will automatically better the finances of Railways.
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The announcements made around modernising the railway infrastructure, improving the safety and efficiency of the network, enabling greater private participation, improving overall passenger comfort, among others bode well for all the stakeholders, Caput said.
