World Bank approves $975 million loan for EDFC

02 Jun 2011 Evaluate

The World Bank (WB) has approved a loan of $975 million to Indian railways to set up the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) (a freight-only rail line) for faster and efficient movement of raw material and goods between Northern and Eastern regions. The corridor will also permit Indian Railways to free up capacity and better serve the large passenger market in the backward and densely populated region. The fund will also help to develop the institutional capacity of the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation (DFCCL) to build and maintain the DFC infrastructure network.

The EDFC is a part of Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) initiative of Indian government. The Indian government is planning to build a dedicated freight corridor connecting to its 4 metropolitan cities i.e. Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. The four rail routes account for 16% of country’s rail network, however, they carry more than 60% of India’s total rail freight. The EDFC will reduce the travel time for passenger trains mainly on Ludhiana-Delhi-Mughal Sarai railway route. The corridor will also add additional capacity to rail transport. It will also improve the quality of service and create higher freight capacity.

Expansion of transport system is an important element of Indian’s trillion dollar infrastructure agenda for the 12th Five Year Plan. After liberalization, the share of railway has reduced sharply as against to road transport, now road transport accounts for around 65% of freight market and 90% passenger market in India. The Indian Railways urgently need to increase freight routes to meet the growing freight traffic in India; the freight traffic is increasing around 7% annually.
 
The loan has the maturity of 22 years with a grace period of 7 years and the WB will finance around 1130 Km of 1839 Km EDFC in three phase. The present approval will finance the first phase which is around 343 km section that runs between Khurja and Kanpur. The DFC corridor will operate entirely through electric locomotives which will improve the efficiency and reduce the emission greenhouse gas (GHG). At present the existing rail network runs on combination of diesel and electrical locomotives.

The DFC program will offer India the opportunity to create one of the world’s largest freight operations, adoption proven international technologies and approaches which can progressively be extended to other important freight routes throughout the rail network. Also DFC will enable the Indian Railways to reduce GHG emissions on these routes by over 64 percent.

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