Railways Coach Manufacturing May See 30% Rise

Railways Coach Manufacturing May See 30% Rise

Railways coach manufacturing units are expected to see an increase of 30 per cent in production by financial year 2020, to about 8000 units. And a further rise by another 25 per cent in financial year 2021. The integral coach factory (ICF) in Chennai is ready to target the manufacturing of 8000 units in 2020. They were manufactured over 3200 coaches in a period of nine months. The railway is also setting sights on exporting coaches, train sets, wheels, and other accessories to countries in Asia and North-America. At present there exports are minimum and concentrated in neighboring countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

 All manufacturing utilities of the railways put together have produced around 6000 units in FY19, which is expected to increase to around 8000 as of now. Rajesh Agarwal, member (rolling back), Railway Board said that wheel factories, too have seen exponential growth in production during the last one year. The railways has also designed new plans to increase freight carrying capacity by another billion tonnes from the existing figure of over 1 billion tonnes in the next four to five years. The main idea behind this was to increase the share of rail in India’s overall freight traffic from a mere 20-25 percent now to around 45 percent. Their plan is to reduce freight logistics cost from 14 percent to 9 percent too. India has a total of 4-5 billion tonnes freight and they have to increase the share of railways to as high as possible. This will be better for the economy. The decrease in logistics cost will be coming through measures like commissioning of eastern and western dedicated freight corridors and new wagon designs catering to specific clients, including the automobile industry. He said that the share of coal which is around 50 per cent of the overall freight, is expected to decline. The automobile sector is high priority area for the national transporter. At present the share of railway in the automobile sector is even less than 10 per cent. There is a huge potential in automobile sector because the total auto freight comes to around four million vehicles.

In recent Maruti Suzuki (MSIL) had said that, they were likely to transport at least half of its cars via the railways by 2030. They were only transported 15 lakh cars via the railway in the past 4 years till FY2019. Automobile players are currently carrying cards on tracks to service providers like APL Vascor and Adani Logistics.