Railways Receives 120 Applications in Response to Private Train RFQ; 14 of 15 Companies Indian

New Delhi: Firms like L&T, GMR, Welspun are among the 15 companies from which the Railways has received over 100 applications in response to the Request for Qualification (RFQ) for PPP in passenger train operations, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. Out of the 15 applicants, 14 are Indian firms while one is a Spanish company.

The firms which have made the applications for the clusters include Arvind Aviation, BHEL, Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarrriles, S.A, Cube Highways and Infrastructure III Pvt Ltd, Gateway Rail freight Limited, GMR Highways Limited, Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation LImited, IRB Infrastructure Developers Limited. The others are L&T Infrastructure Development Projects Limited, Malempati Power Private Limited, Megha Engineering and Infrastructures Limited, PNC Infratech Ltd, RK Associates and Hoteliers Pvt Ltd, Sainath Sales and Services Pvt Ltd and Welspun Enterprises Limited.

In all 120 applications have been received for the 12 clusters, from 15 applicant firms," the ministry said in a statement. It may be noted that Ministry of Railways (MOR) had invited Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for private participation in operation of passenger train services over 12 Clusters comprising 140 Origin Destination pair of routes through introduction of 151 modern trains to increase high quality trains operated on the network, it said.

This includes 12 applications each for the Delhi 2 and Mumbai 2 clusters, 11 for the Bengaluru cluster, 10 applications each for the Prayagraj, Secunderabad, Jaipur and Delhi 1 cluster and nine each for Chandigarh, Howrah, Patna, Mumbai 1 and Chennai. The Railways had invited RFQs for private participation in operation of passenger train services over 12 clusters comprising 140 pairs of routes through introduction of 151 modern trains on the network.

This is the first major initiative to attract private investment for running passenger trains over the Indian Railway network. The project is expected to entail private sector investment of about Rs 30,000 crore. 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 RFQs for 12 clusters were published on July 1. MoR will expeditiously complete the evaluation of applications and RFP documents will be made available to the qualified applicants by November 2020. MoR has targeted to award all the clusters by February, 2021," it said.

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