World Bank to take up Eastern rail Corridor: Jena

Bhubaneswar, Apr 07(UNI) The World Bank has submitted the appraisal study for the development of Eastern Rail Corridor while the loan appraisal study for the Western Rail corridor has been taken up by Japanese funding Agency, Railway Board Chairman K C Jena said here today.

Talking to newspersons here, Mr Jena said the World Bank has already held the first round discussion for the Eastern Corridor project and in case of the Western , the letter of comfort would be issued in the next few days so that the funding pattern would be decided in the first quarter of 2009.

Mr Jena said more freight corridor such as North- South corridor from Delhi-Chennai, West-East Corridor from Mumbai to Kolkata,South- East Corridor from Chennai to Kolkata and South-South Corridor from Chennai to Goa would also be taken up for which the Parliament would be asked to sanction money.

There would be no difficulty in getting fund for these rail corridors as the railways would go for multilateral funding and market borrowing besides the budgetary support for the projects.

He said increasing the capacity of the railways in the country would be the main focus during the next few years as the railways had earmarked Rs 75,000 crores in the next five years to develop the rail corridor and the high density network The Railway Board Chairman claimed that the Operation Ratio of the Indian Railways which stood at 76.3 per cent was much better than any other railways in the world including that if United States The freight loading during 2007-2008 was targetted at 785 to 790 million tonnes but we expect it to touch 795 million tonnes, Mr Jena said.

UNI DP KK DB1822