National Railways Plan 2020

The Indian government has tabled the ‘Indian Railways Vision 2020’ in 2009 with the aim to provide efficient, affordable, customer-focused and environmentally sustainable integrated transportation solutions.

Objectives

The core objectives this Vision 2020 -

• Providing compelling value to all customers and citizens through highly competitive high-quality services.
• Expansion and modernization of Railway network to provide inclusive service, remove bottleneck and create capacity and improving productivity of assets and efficiency of operations through technological and managerial innovation.
• Judicious reorganization of Railway’s activities into distinct business lines and profit centres.
• Building a highly cohesive and motivated organization with emphasis on Human Capital.

Challenges

Some of the basic challenges against the government’s vision-

• There are capacity constrains, as trunk routes of the railways comprising merely 16% of the network carry more than 50% of the traffic
• Safety standards and performances are weak
• Lower reliability of services
• Slower average speeds as compared to the global level
• Low technological upgradation,
• Connectivity issues and constraints
• Supply side constraints etc.

Major Achievements

The major achievements of the Indian railways from last decade includes-

• First modern unreserved coach ‘Deen Dayalu’ with facilities like potable drinking water, mobile charging points and bio-toilets among others installed.
• Heralding a new era of semi-high speed trains in the country like Gatiman Express.
• Milestone in adoption of green fuel in Indian Railways, the first CNG train was launched on the Rewari-Rohtak section of Northern zone.
• Privatisation of catering in trains.
• The Indian Railways introduced Spanish Talgo, a light train consuming 30 per cent less energy.
• Operation augment services at stations to bring down the maximum time taken for buying a ticket at counters to five minutes.
• Wifi enabled railway platforms.
• Railways had set a target to install bio-toilets in all coaches by 2019.
• 1806 Kisan Rails run on 153 routes (upto 24.12.2021) and carried around 5.9 lakh tones of agricultural products.
• Conversion of 4,176 coaches to serve as quarantine facilities.
• Indian Railways ran Oxygen Express at the shortest possible time and ramping up the delivery.
• To tap the vast tourism potential of India, Indian Railways have launched a new tourism product i.e. theme based tourist circuit trains ‘Bharat Gaurav’.