(ET)
Interim Finance Minister Piyush Goyal has set the railway capex for FY20 at record Rs 1.6 lakh crore. Budget 2018-19 had set capital expenditure for railways at Rs 1.48 lakh crore. Goyal announced capital support for railways at Rs 64,587 crore for FY20 in his Budget 2019 speech. In the previous Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said most of this money would be spent on capacity expansion, since it was a priority for the national transporter. He proposed a target of doubling 18,000 km of lines and said gauge conversion was underway to eliminate capacity constraints. The minister said 36,000 km of rail track renewal had been targeted in the coming year while 4,267 unmanned railway crossings on broad gauge routes were to be eliminated in the next two years.
