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Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Thursday cleared a Rs 15,000-crore railways development plan. He also cleared a proposal to provide I-cards to all Indian citizens.
Union Home Ministry officials said they would soon have a plan ready to provide multi-purpose, machine-readable identity cards to all citizens. A pilot project will be launched in October to cover select districts in eight states.
Under the railways development plan, Rs 15,000 crore will be invested in the next five years to remove all capacity bottlenecks in critical sections of the railways. This will include a Rs 8000-crore project to strengthen the golden quadrilateral to run more long-distance mail, express and freight trains at higher speeds.
Rs 3,500 crore will be spent on construction of four bridges -- two over the river Ganga, one over the Brahmaputra and one on the river Kosi.
Currently, there are sanctioned projects worth Rs 40,000 crore languishing for want of funds or environmental and other clearances. The government has decided to draw up a plan to complete all viable sanctioned railway projects within the next 10 years.
Work on the Rs 3,564-crore Udhampur-Baramulla railway line in Jammu and Kashmir will be given on a single-tender basis to IRCON and the Konkan Railway Corporation.
The proposal of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution to set up a national commodities exchange to streamline commodity futures trading has also been cleared by the prime minister.
PTI
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