E-Paper
Industry welcomes railway budget's initiatives
Reactions to the rail budget were mainly positive with logistics players, exporters and analysts describing it as "forward-looking."
Reactions to the rail budget were mainly positive with logistics players, exporters and analysts describing it as "forward-looking."
"The railway budget is more reformist than populist. Rather than giveaways in the form of lower passenger tariffs, the focus is on productive utilisation of spare land and developing railway infrastructure," Sharekhan's Research Head, Gaurav Dua, said.
The productive utilisation of railway land was described as a positive by Transport Corporation of India's (TCI) Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, D P Agarwal.
"The use of railway land-bank for industrial development, freight terminals and multi-modal logistics parks is likely to have a positive impact on the logistics sector," Agarwal said.
Setting up cold storage facilities for farmers to store their crop production would help reduce wastages in the system, he added.
Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO)'s President, A Sakthivel, supported the above view, saying that "initiatives such as introduction of temperature control perishable cargo terminals and increasing targets for carriage of freight would facilitate trade logistics."
Dua highlighted the "no increase in freight tariffs" as a positive for many core sectors like steel and cement, amongst others.
