The lifeline of the nation is soon to get a new life. The Railway Ministry headed by Piyush Goyal is set to finalise an ambitious roadmap for the department that will set targets and deliverables for every aspect of the massive transport network. “The railway ministry may announce the roadmap, which we are working on, in a month’s time,” Lakshmi Raman, executive director (Quality Assurance, Mechanical) of Research Designs and Standards Organization (RDSO) told DNA Money.

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RDSO, part of the Railways Ministry, sets design and standardisation for railway equipment and also selects all private sector vendors who supply to the Railways. “Board officials are currently brainstorming every aspect of Railways operations such as tracks, coaching, signalling, and even speed,” Raman said.

Indian Railways’ infrastructure is highly strained due to years of under-investment and it needs a significant capacity addition to achieve some of the targets set in its Vision 2022 document announced in July 2017. The current roadmap would chalk out how to achieve those targets.

Railways is currently executing an ambitious plan to modernise all rail coaches by replacing the old ICF, or Integrated Coach Factory, coaches by those designed by Linke-Hofmann-Busch of Germany popularly known as LHB coaches. But the execution of the plan is being severely hampered by capacity constraints of the private sector suppliers.

“As per the plan, Railways would stop manufacturing the older ICF model from this year. Now we need to scale up making LHB coaches from less than 2,000 to about 6,000 in the next 2-3 years. But for this, we need to expand the vendor base as well. This year we can only reach 2,500-3,000 LHB coaches because of (constraints of) vendor base,” said Raman, who was in city for Confederation of Indian Industry roadshow to tie-up prospective suppliers.

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“We have greatly simplified vendors registration and have been meeting them regularly. While it took two years to register a vendor earlier, we have now been able to register two such vendors in 80 days. Things are improving,” he said.

Source: DNA Money