ET GBS 2024: Govt cranks up engine to put Vande Bharat trains on international tracks, says Ashwini Vaishnaw
Vande Bharat trains in the coming years, railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the Global Business Summit on Saturday.
«The challenge was to develop it (Vande Bharat) in our country by our own engineers and the challenge has been taken very well. I can say with a good level of confidence that in the coming years, we would start exporting this train,» said Vaishnaw, who also holds the communications, and electronics and information technology portfolios.
The minister said the feedback on Vande Bharat has been good but more improvements will be done on the trains. «Work has already started on another version of the train, the Vande Sleeper,» he said.
Talking about the digital infrastructure, Vaishnaw said India has witnessed the fastest 5G rollout in the world. «If you combine the 5G towers in two continents, I won't take any names, but India has more 5G radiating towers than the sum of the two large continents. That is the pace at which the rollout has happened in flat 16 months,» he said. Around 80% of the telecom equipment used in the rollout has been 'made-in-Bharat'.
Elaborating on the indigenously developed telecom technology stack, Vaishnaw said 3,000 towers are functional and the project is stable. «Coming April-May, we will start scaling it up in a very big way and in the coming years, this system will be competing with the top systems in the entire world. We would be competing with Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, Nokia and Ericsson,» he stressed.
This will be another technology exported from India, he said.
