1. Historical Perspective

2. Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFC)
     Necessity    Golden Quadrilateral Freight Corridor (GQFC)    Proposed Dedicated Freight Corridors    Summary table of DFCs   Conversion to high-speed corridors 

3. Transformational effect on Indian economy and railway
    See also 

4. References
    External links 

The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Limited (DFCCIL) is a corporation run by the Ministry of Railways (India) to undertake planning & development, mobilisation of financial resources and construction, maintenance and operation of the Dedicated Freight Corridors. DFCCIL has been registered as a company under the Companies Act 1956 on 30 October 2006.

It is both enabler and beneficiary of other key Government of India schemes, such as and Industrial corridor, Make in India, Startup India, Standup India, Sagarmala, Bharatmala, UDAN-RCS, Digital India, BharatNet and UMANG.

Historical Perspective

In April 2005, wherein, India and Japan announced collaboration for feasibility and possible funding of the dedicated rail freight corridors, and RITES was entrusted with the feasibility study of both eastern and western corridors, followed by formation of a Planning Commission's Task Force to prepare a concept paper on Delhi-Mumbai (Western) and Delhi-Howrah (Eastern) dedicated freight corridor projects, and to suggest a new organizational structure for planning, financing, construction and operation of these corridors. In January 2006, RITES submitted the Feasibility Study Report of both the corridors and Cabinet approved Task Force's report, Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) gave "in principle" approval to the Feasibility Study report. Subsequently, RITES submitted the PETS Report based on which the project was approved at a cost of Rs.281.81 billion{{Citation needed|date=September 2010}}.

Dedicated Freight Corridors (DFC)

Under the Eleventh Five Year Plan of India (2007–12), Ministry of Railways is constructing a new Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) in two long routes namely, the Eastern and Western freight corridors.^[1] The two routes covers a total length of {{Convert|3360|km|mi}}, with the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor stretching from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni in West Bengal and the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor from Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Mumbai (Maharashtra) to Dadri in Uttar Pradesh.^[2] Upgrading of transportation technology, increase in productivity and reduction in unit transportation cost are the focus areas for the project.^[3]

DFCCIL has been designated by Government of India as a `special purpose vehicle`, and has been created to undertake planning & development, mobilization of financial resources and construction, maintenance and operation of the Dedicated Freight Corridors. DFCCIL has been registered as a company under the Companies Act 1956 on 30 October 2006.^[4]

Necessity

Economic liberalization of 1991 followed by Information Technology industry explosion have taken India to a new growth scenario. Backed by strong fundamentals and commendable growth in the past three to four years, the resplendent Indian Economy is poised to grow even further at an average of 8 to 10% in the next 3 years.{{Citation needed|date=September 2010}} Transport requirement in the country, being primarily a derived demand, is slated to increase with elasticity of 1.25 with GDP growth by 10 to 12% in the medium and long term range. Riding on the waves of economic success, Indian Railways has witnessed a dramatic turn around and unprecedented financial turnover in the last two and a half years. This has been made possible by higher freight volumes without substantial investment in infrastructure, increased axle load, reduction of turn-round time of rolling stock, reduced unit cost of transportation, rationalization of tariffs resulting in improvement in market share and improved operational margins. Over the last 2 to 3 years, the railway freight traffic has grown by 8 to 11%, which is projected to cross 1100 million tonnes by the end of 11th Five Year Plan.

Golden Quadrilateral Freight Corridor (GQFC)

GQFC has 6 DFCs, 2 are being implemented and the funding for the remaining 4 was approved in January 2018. The rail tracks linking four largest metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata and two diagonals North-South Dedicated Freight Corridor (Delhi-Chennai) and East-West Dedicated Freight Corridor (Kolkata-Mumbai) are called the Golden Quadrilateral (GQFC). These carry 55% of the India Railway's freight traffic over a total {{Convert|10122|km|mi|abbr=on}} route length. The line capacity utilization on the existing highly saturated shared trunk routes of Howrah-Delhi on the Eastern Corridor and Mumbai-Delhi on the Western Corridor varies between 115% to 150%.{{Citation needed|date=September 2010}} The surging requirement for the power generation requiring heavy coal movement, booming infrastructure construction and growing international trade has led to the conception of the GQFCs. Carbon emission reduction from DFCs will help DFCCIL claim carbon credits.

1. Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, 1,468 km from Dadri in Uttar Pradesh to Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Mumbai.^&91;5&93;
2. Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor, Ludhiana, 1,760 km from Punjab to Dankuni in West Bengal .^&91;5&93;

1. East-West Dedicated Freight Corridor, 2,000 km-long from Kolkata to Mumbai
2. North-South Dedicated Freight Corridor, 2,173 km long from Delhi to Chennai
3. East Coast Dedicated Freight Corridor, 1,100 km long from Kharagpur to Vijayawada
4. South-West Dedicated Freight Corridor, 890 km-long from Chennai to Goa

Proposed Dedicated Freight Corridors

• Chennai - Goa Dedicated Freight Corridor:^[2][6] This DFC goes through Bangalore-Chennai Industrial Corridor promoted by Japan & India.(There are proposals to extend this line to Mangalore to connect India's biggest Petrochemical complex, international air-cargo facility(direct flights to gulf and Europe) and major seaport in Mangalore with Whitefield ICD(Inland Container Depot), through a tunnel being constructed with the help of Japan in Western ghats.^[7][8] This will result in hazardous petrochemicals currently being transported by road through tankers migrated to the railway cargo, resulting in efficiency improvements in country's energy security and safety to the common people living alongside national highways).

• Heavy Haul Rail Corridor: Indian Port Rail Company Limited (IPRCL) has proposed of laying the third and fourth broad gauge railway line from Malegaon in Maharashtra to Paradip and Dhamra ports both on Odisha Coast. The railway lines will be dedicated to carry freight and mostly thermal coal. The development of this project will give a fillip to the government’s initiative to promote multi modal logistics and Coastal shipping.^[9][10]

Summary table of DFCs

Green background for the systems that are under construction. Blue background for the systems that are currently in planning.

Conversion to high-speed corridors

IR plans to convert 10,000 km passenger and freight trunk routes in to High-speed rail corridors of India over 10 years with total investment of {{INRConvert|20|t|currency_formatting=c|lk=on|to=USD|year=2017}} and annual investment of {{INRConvert|2|t|currency_formatting=c|lk=on|to=USD|year=2017}} from 2017-2027, where half of the money will be spent on converting exiting routes into high-speed corridors by leap-frogging the technology and the rest will be used to develop the stations and electronic signaling at the cost of {{INRConvert|600|b|currency_formatting=c|lk=on|to=USD|year=2017}} to enable automated running of trains at 5-6 minutes frequency. Freight corridors of 3,300 km length will also be completed thus freeing the dual use high demand trunk routes for running more high-speed passenger trains.^[12]

Transformational effect on Indian economy and railway

• Freight trains with 1.5 km length, 3660 mm width and 7.1 metre height clearance, a first and only in the world.^[13]
• Double-stack standard shaped containers transported through electric locomotives with trailing loads of 15000 ton and trains with 400 container capacity, a first and only in the world.^[14]
• Bridges & formation to support 32.5 Ton axle load and track loading capacity of 12 t/m, a first at a large scale and travel distance.
• 800 electric locomotives with 12,000 HP, biggest deployment of very high horse-powered locomotive anywhere in the world.
• High speed freight trains running above 100+ km/h, one of the few in the world.
• Radio communication and GSM based tracking of all trains - a first in Indian railway sector.
• DFC corridor has no level crossings and uses one of the most advanced construction techniques to improve the quality and speed of construction.
• DFC aims to bring down the cost of freight transport using electrical fuel, bigger and larger trains. This will help Indian industry to become competitive in the world export market.^[15]
• DFC will help India to achieve target committed by India in the Paris climate accord, by migrating from diesel propelled freight trains and fossil fuel based road traffic to electricity based railway locomotives. India is leader in renewable energy with most of the new electricity generation capacity is added using solar, wind and nuclear sources.^[16]
• The new generation pantograph allows an increase in the highest of the overhead wires (catenary height) from the standard 6 meters to 7.5 meters-setting the world record for the High Reach pantograph for highest catenary for electric locomotives. This will also enable Indian Railways to introduce double-decker passenger trains in high density suburban passenger route and Ro-Ro cargo service across the Indian Railways network.
• Indian passenger railway network will be able to run semi-high speed and high speed trains in the existing network as cargo traffic will migrate to DFC.
• Eastern DFC may not be able to support [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npvAAaY-cWg RoRo] as it has height of 5.1 meter compared to 7.1 meter of the Western DFC. Because of this only Western DFC may be able to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQbAqfr-7Jg support] RoRo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZlAbOc-EtA services]. Konkan railway is the only railway zone in India, which has streamlined the RoRo service and able to save 750 lakh litre diesel and related foreign exchange for the country.^[17] RoRo services are deployed in East Central Railway, Northeast Frontier Railway zones along with Konkan Railway. But, RoRo has been failed to be successful in existing electrical railway infrastructure because of the height of the overhead electrical wires.^[18][19]

See also

• High-speed rail in India
• Indian Railways
• Rail Transport in India

References

External links

• Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India (DFCCIL) Official Website
• Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India (DFCCIL) Official link for project status
• DFCC will use New Track Construction machine having capacity of 1.5 KM of track per day
• March 2014 news article stating near total land acquisition and environmental clearances
• DFCCIL Admit card at Official Site

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