The Hindu Business Line : Plan to modernise 2 Delhi Rly stations on public-pvt partnership

With the New Delhi railway station modernisation expected to take a year or so to get off the ground, the Railway Ministry will now focus on developing other greenfield railway stations in the peripheral areas of New Delhi.

It has identified two locations for developing railway stations in the National Capital Region – Anand Vihar in East Delhi and Bijwasan in South West Delhi. These stations will be developed on a public private partnership (PPP) basis.

Simultaneously, the Ministry has also decided to delegate powers to the General Managers of zonal Railways to take up the station modernisation programme of other 25 identified stations on a PPP basis.

Earlier, the plan was that the New Delhi station modernisation programme can be a model and other zonal railways can follow it.

However, with the New Delhi station modernisation programme getting unusually delayed due to various reasons, the Ministry has decided to start the work on other stations as well.

For the New Delhi station modernisation programme, the Ministry has circulated a draft MCA to seven-eight bidders who had submitted qualifying proposals. But before moving on to the financial bid stage, the Ministry wants to get other administrative approvals required for the project.

Traffic study

For modernising the station, RITES is doing a traffic study, according to the request by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and the Delhi Traffic Police. The study will analyse the impact of the station modernisation programme on the traffic in the area.

Additionally, the Delhi Masterplan needs to be amended to increase the floor area ratio (FAR) from the existing level of 15 per cent.

“This can be done by the Urban Development Ministry, and the process will take about six-seven months at the very least,” said a Railway Ministry official.

Qualification bids

Moreover, there is encroachment in the nearby area which has to be physically cleared. The companies who have submitted bids for qualification for the New Delhi station modernisation are TRIF Infrastructure and Grandi Stazioni SPA (Italy); Larsen and Toubro Transco; DB Realty and Deutsche Bahn (German Railways); Nishok Realty, Spanish Railway, Posmar Inversions, Yoman Infrastructure, Parnesh Real Estate; Morgan Stanley Infrastructure and VNR Rail Infrastructure; KMC Construction, China Railway 18th Bureau Group; GVK Developmental Projects, Leighton.

The stations to be modernised include Chhatrapati Shivaji Station (Mumbai), Howrah, Chennai Central, Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Mathura, Pune, Patna, Secunderabad and Thiruvananthapuram.

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