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Railways Minister DV Sadananda Gowda has done his bit to resolve the infrastructure constraints faced by the power sector.
On Tuesday, in his Budget for 2014-15, the Minister announced projects for improving coal linkages as well as augmenting the capacity on congested routes.
To improve the coal linkages, a critical issue for fuel-starved thermal power plants, the Minister announced three new railway lines: Tori-Shivpur-Kathautia, Jharsuguda-Barpalli-Sardega and Bhupeopur-Raigarh-Mand.
“This will bring nearly 100 million tonnes of incremental traffic to railways and will also facilitate faster transportation of coal to power houses,” said Gowda.
As per the Association of Power Producers, nearly 28,834 MW of thermal power plants are stressed on account of lack of fuel linkages. On July 3, 47 out of the 100 coal-based power plants in the country had critical levels of fuel stocks.
After a recent industry interaction, Minister of State (Independent Charge) Power, Coal and New and Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal had recommended setting up new railway lines to improve fuel supply to the power plants.
Welcoming the announcement of expediting work on three railway lines critical for coal transportation from mineral-rich Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, NTPC said these lines would help in faster transportation of coal to the power stations. Apart from the new projects, Gowda also announced capacity augmentation for congested routes, which would be undertaken in a public-private-partnership model, adopting the build-operate-transfer route and annuity route for capacity augmentation of 8-10 congested lines.
In-principle approvalThe PPP mode would also be undertaken to facilitate connectivity to new and upcoming ports, Gowda said.
“So far, in-principle approval has been granted for building rail connectivity to the ports of Jaigarh, Dighi, Rewas, Hazira, Tuna, Dholera and Astranga under the Participative Model Policy of the Indian Railways amounting to a total of over ₹4,000 crore,” the Minister added.
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