Railway Budget introduces Vision 2020

BANGALORE, INDIA: Railway Budget 2010 today introduced a Vision 2020. This ten year road map will be broken up in to short, medium and long term projects.

While announcing the railway budget 2010, Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee said that the ministry has drafter a longterm plan called Vision 2010. These would be followed over the next decade.

Another major announcement made in the budget was that Railways will continue to operate under the government, but will open up new avenues of revenues through PPP. Mamata said, “We are a proud family of 14 lakh members and we do not go for privatization. However, we do not have business model to generate more revues and would invite domestic investment.”

The minister said e-ticket based mobile vans will be extended to government medical college hospitals, High Courts, District Court, University campus, IT hubs, IITs and IIMs.  The Railway Minister announced that railway reservation ticket centres will also be opened at district headquarters and village panchayats to give more facility to common man.



Touching upon the technological enhancements she announced that the trains would have RFID technology for tracking wagons and engines. Railway would pilot SMS alerts project in Delhi and Kolkata. It will also introduce E-tickets centers in districts and Panchayat levels. The minister also said the Center for Railway Research would be set up at IIT-Kharagpur.

On the green sustainability side, she added, “We have proposed to built Railway eco parks, and also GPS based driver guidance service to save 8-10 per cent energy.

However, around two years back during the railway budget announcement in February 2008, the erstwhile Railway Minister Lalu Prasad had also announced to implement modern communications systems such as the global information system (GIS), global positioning system (GPS) and radio frequency identification (RFID).

So the next question is whether we would see the same promises in next budget too!