NHSRCL preparing DPR for six high speed rail corridors

The Union government has tasked the National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd (NHSRCL) to prepare DPRs for six high-speed corridors to be built across the country. Of these, two are in Maharashtra including a 753-km-long Mumbai-Nashik-Nagpur corridor and a 711-km corridor connecting Mumbai to Hyderabad via Pune. The other four high-speed corridors include the Delhi-Noida-Agra-Kanpur-Lucknow-Varanasi (865 km), Delhi-Jaipur-Udaipur-Ahmedabad (886 km), Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysore (435 km), and Delhi-Chandigarh-Ludhiana-Jalandhar-Amritsar (459 km). The new network is aimed at creating a diamond quadrilateral corridor connecting major cities and economic centres of the country, and NHSRCL will soon appoint a consultant for the project to study its cost, market demand to ascertain projected ridership, and suitable form of construction such as underground or surface. The report, once prepared, will be sent to the Railway Board for scrutiny after which it will require a Cabinet nod. The report will also look at the possibility of inter-modal transport integration among various existing and planned networks. The NHSRCL is a special purpose vehicle created to execute the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project wherein both Maharashtra and Gujarat will put in ₹5,000 crore each, while the Railway Board would give ₹10,000 crore.