Railway Ministry has released final contours of the National Rail Plan (NRP), wherein a new high speed railway (HSR) route is proposed linking Nagpur to the ancient city of Varanasi. Overall, six new routes are identified for the ambitious transport plan by the expert committee on modernisation of Indian Railways. The Varanasi link to the Orange City is proposed as an additional corridor and the same would be part of Mumbai-Varanasi HSR line.

The Varanasi plan would fulfill the long-standing demand of North Indian community from central part of the country for a direct train link to their paternal place in hinterland of Uttar Pradesh. The route would be connected with Delhi-Agra-Lucknow package, thereby providing additional advantage for travellers from Nagpur.

Nagpur-Nashik HSR is already under planning stage. For this, a survey was ordered by the National High Speed Rail Corporation (NHSRC). It was identified in the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) a few years back. The 855 kms long new route to Varanasi is likely to be operational by year 2041. Also, Nashik route phase is planned to be operationalised by year 2051. In the NRP, released recently, Railways have detailed the outline for the next 40 years with a break up of every 10 years during which the projects outlined are to be executed.

As to HSR, the identified routes are Delhi-Agra-Lucknow- Varanasi (865 kms), Delhi-Chandigarh-Amritsar (460 kms), Delhi-Udaipur-Ahmedabad (886 kms), Mumbai -Nashik - Nagpur (753 kms), Mumbai- Hyderabad (711 kms), Chennai-Bengaluru -Mysore (435 kims). Barring the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route, there is no progress on any of the corridor, so far.

The report also mentions creation of additional linkage of Delhi-Chandigarh-Amritsar (450 km) and extending it till Jalandhar and then to Jammu-Pathankot. Delhi-Agra-Kanpur-Lucknow-Varanasi route is suggested to be routed via Ayodhya and extending it till Patna and then to Guwahati and this should be routed via Katihar and New Jalpaiguri to connect Guwahati with Delhi-Varanasi-Kolkata corridor. Another HSR is proposed between Hyderabad and Bengaluru by extending Mumbai-Hyderabad route as same will provide connection to Mumbai with Chennai. When entire network is rolled out, all major towns of North, West and South India will be connected with one HSR corridor helping in deepening regional linkage and boost the economy.

Also, Hyderabad-Dornakal-Vijayawada-Chennai (664 km); Howrah-Haldia (135 km); Chennai-Bengaluru-Coimbatore-Ernakulam (850 km); Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi-Patna (991 km) and Ernakulam-Thiruvanan-

thapuram (194 km) corridors should be linked with faster train services, the NRP has suggested. The HSR is meant to address the current shortcomings in Railways, where due to clogged network the overall speed has reduced as over the years there has been rapid increase in transport of passengers and goods. The criteria for identifying the HSR is that each of the cities that are proposed to be inter-linked must have population base of one million and they should be separated by a distance between 300-700 km. Basically the HSR routes are aligned with Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC). Incidentally, both are high density routes where future projections have been taken into active consideration. Plus they must have importance from point of religion and also tourism, further AC passenger share was also taken into account on these routes. However, one of the main contention was that the cities to be inter-connected with HSR must not have air connectivity or at the most in a restricted manner. As per plans, the train speed would be between 250-350 km/hr.