Piyush Goyal, Union Minister for Railways, Government of India brainstorms the possible ways and means towards transforming the freight operations of the Indian railways, in a meeting with key stakeholders of the logistics industry. Highlighting the key role that railways is playing during this pandemic, the minister said that railways looks upon the COVID-19 crisis with great deal of concern and sympathy and during this period, railways has acted as a lifeline for the nation by carrying essential goods across the country. “We also utilised this time for completion of some of our long pending works like increasing connectivity to the main lines, carrying out maintenance works, dismantling/repairing damaged bridges and improving our existing infrastructural facilities”, said Goyal.
He continues, “Simultaneously, we have also acknowledged the tremendous opportunity presented by the freight and logistics business and have planned several measures to improve our services in the near future.” The meeting saw a host of constructive suggestions which included switching to an assured time bound delivery model, providing some kind of insurance mechanism to the partners, rationalising the freight rates and make logistics costs more reasonable, improving the efficiency of loading/unloading at terminals as well as ports in a phased manner etc. Welcoming the suggestions from the industry, Minister said that innovation is key and the solutions need to be profitable to bring the logistics cost down. “We need end-to-end nonstop faster trains, better signaling systems, better scheduled and time table cargo trains and better financing options, to transform the freight operations and help achieve the target of doubling the total freight traffic to 2.5 billion tonnes”, said Goyal.
