Piyush Goyal, Fadnavis dedicate rail services to public

Mumbai: Just ahead of the announcement of the model code of conduct for the Lok Sabha election, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and railway minister Piyush Goyal dedicated various services and amenities to the public on Sunday. Mr Goyal said that 320 FoBs had been set up on Central Railway (CR) and Western Railway (WR) in 160 years (1853 to 2014) while 129 FOBs have been set up since April 2014 (in the last five years) and work on another 131 are being undertaken. Thus, 260 FOBs will have been constructed in six years. A hundred and eighty escalators have been approved for suburban stations in Mumbai, while Parel Terminus has been dedicated to Mumbaikars by the chief minister and railway minister.

Speaking at the programme at CSMT, Mr Goyal claimed that the works that have been done in the last five years were not done in the last fifty years.

He said, “Approximately 650-km electrification had been done on Indian Railways (IR) till 2013-14 and 4,000-km electrification has been done till 2018. It will reach 6,000 km electrification by March 2019. It means that electrification has been increased by ten times.”  

He said that there were only three lifts on CR and WR, 78 lifts have come up till now. Installation work on 16 lifts is going on and 170 lifts will be installed in the coming days.

An MoU regarding the redevelopment of Dharavi was also signed between Railway Land Develo-pment Authority (RLDA) of Railways and the Dharavi Re-development Authority (DRA) of the state in the presence of ministers.