JICA submits final report on Dedicated Freight Corridor

New Delhi, Oct 19 (UNI) Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), which was commissioned by the Railway Ministry to prepare a report on the ambitious Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) today presented its final study report.

The report was presented to Railway Board Chairman K C Jena by T Fujii, Resident Representative, JICA India. Mr Tetsuya Masuzawa, Deputy Team Leader and other members of JICA Study Team were also present.

The Railways has proposed a 2700-km-long railway line project -- Eastern Corridor (1279 km) and Western corridor (1483 km) -- to augment the capacity of its network to handle the large increase in volume of traffic over the coming years.

Once completed, the DFC would enable freight trains to run at a speed of 80-90 km per hour as compared to the existing 25-30 km.

Mr Jena said the DFC projects are the flagship projects of Indian Railways and are one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in the country.

''The project is very vital for the Indian Railways for capacity creation to meet the ever-growing traffic requirements,'' he said, adding that the implementation of this project would require massive resources and would be ''a challenge for our engineers in more ways than one.'' Mr Jena said the completion of JICA study marked the culmination of an initiative which originated in April 2005 in the Joint Declaration by the Prime Ministers of India and Japan.

''The study was agreed upon by the governments of the two countries and is a good example of Indo-Japanese cooperation,'' he said.

The Railway Board Chairman also expressed confidence that this study was only the beginning of cooperation between India and Japan on the DFC project.

Mr Jena said development of DFC for carrying additional traffic is essential in view of high growth in demand.

UNI