L&T Infrastructure Development Projects, IRB Infrastructure Developers, GMR Highways, BHEL and the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation are among the companies that have expressed interest in running passenger train services.

Spain’s Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarrriles has also responded to the Railway Ministry’s Request for Qualifications (RFQ).

An official statement said that the RFQ was for private participation in operation of passenger train services over 12 clusters comprising 140 Origin Destination pairs of routes through introduction of 151 modern trains to increase high quality trains operated on the network.

In all 120 applications have been received for the 12 clusters, from 15 firms.

This is the first major initiative of attracting private investment for running passenger trains on the Indian Railway Network. The project is expected to entail private sector investment of about ₹30,000 crore, the statement said.

The private entities for undertaking the project would be selected through a transparent two-stage competitive bidding process comprising of Request for Qualification (RFQ) and Request for Proposal (RFP). The RFQ for 12 clusters were published on July 1, 2020.

RFP documents

The RFP documents will be made available to the qualified applicants by November 2020. The Railway Ministry has targeted to award all the clusters by February 2021, the statement added.

The Mumbai 2 and Delhi 2 clusters attracted the highest interest with 12 RFQs each. The Bengaluru cluster comes second with 11 companies showing interest.

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