The railways' most ambitious projects so far — the Rs81,500 crore Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) — has a new challenge. The City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (Cidco) — the planning authority for the Navi Mumbai area — has been demanding a much higher rate for the land to be acquired for the project in Maharashtra than the prevailing market rate. This, officials said, could hit the speed of a project on which the current Narendra Modi government has put great emphasis on as a means of turning around the fortunes of the railways.
During a meeting between railway minister Suresh Prabhu and chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday, the issue was extensively discussed. In a text reply to a dna query on whether the state would accept the railways' demand for reducing the cost of land, Fadnavis said "we are working on a formula".
According to top-level railway ministry officials, the DFC has a requirement of 39 hectares of land in a 20-30 metre wide strip along the current Central Railway alignment between Panvel and Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNPT). Cidco has put the tab for land acquisition at Rs3,370 crore or roughly Rs87 crore per hectare. This, according to DFC officials, is much higher than the Rs30-40 crore per hectare that was finalised by the state government's Rate Committee which was tasked into stipulating the cost of land that needs to be acquired for various government projects.
According to railway officials, some tweaking of the land requirement in the JNPT area has meant that now the project requires 35 hectares instead of 39 hectares. The railways wants the state government to get Cidco to reduce the cost of land acquisition to fast-track the project.
As per the latest work schedule of DFC, the project is to be completed by 2019. It comprises a 1,856 kilometre corridor between Dankuni in West Bengal to Ludhiana in Punjab at a cost of Rs26,700 crore. The Western leg of the project is a 1,504 corridor from JNPT port in Navi Mumbai to Dadri in Uttar Pradesh at a cost of Rs46,718 crore.
Once operational, it is expected to take off almost 70 per cent of the freight currently being transported by the railways, leaving considerable capacity with the railways to run passenger trains.
Land muddle for DFC
The Western and Eastern legs of the DFC requires a total of 10,548 hectares of land of which 85 per cent has already been acquired. However, resistance over land acquisition is being faced at around 296 spots on the Western corridor and 144 patches in the Eastern corridor. The land is being acquired under the Railway Amendment Act 2008 and compensation is being given as per norms of the New Land Acquisition Act which came into effect from January 1, 2015.
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