Budget 2025 | Railways may step up investment for augmenting network in FY26 budget
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: Indian Railways is preparing itself for a big increase in allocations for laying new train tracks in the upcoming budget as part of efforts to modernize the network, deploy fast train and rail travel safer. The plan is to raise allocations for new tracks to over ₹50,000 crore in FY26, a 50% increase over budgeted expenditure for FY25, according to two persons aware of the development.
Higher allocation will allow Railways to augment its network especially in high congestion areas and between cities that have seen rapid growth in both road traffic and economy. Faster development of new lines, including gauge conversion, doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of lines in certain sectors is required to expand the network coverage of semi-high-speed trains such as Vande Bharat. These trains will need better and stronger tracks to move at speeds of up to 200 km per hour.
In FY25 (in the first nine-month period up to December 2024), capacity augmentation has been the biggest head for investment by the Railways. Of the ₹2.52 trillion allotted to the ministry from Central government coffers, ₹81,713 crore has been spent on capacity augmentation. Laying the new tracks is part of a new vision 2047 document for the national transporter, under which it expects add 100,000 km of new alignments, including replacements, over the next 25 years costing ₹15-20 trillion.
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