New Delhi: After taking over as the new
Railway Minister, Dinesh Trivedi on Thursday unveiled an 11-point
programme to modernise the public-sector behemoth and
announced that there will be no unmanned crossings by 2016.
"Our efforts will be to ensure that by 2016 all level
crossings are either manned or have an overbridge," he said
here.
Currently, there are 32,694 level crossings across the
country, of which 14,853 are unmanned.
According to official data, 229 people were killed at
unmanned level crossings in 2010-11 and 95 in 2011-12.
The 11-point agenda, declared by Trivedi includes
preparation of a national data base of railway owned land for
land use and focuses on exploration of new projects such as
high-speed rail to meet growing needs of Indian transport
sector, besides forging linkages with other transport hubs.
Trivedi also emphasised indigenisation of Indian
Railways such as new designs and developments to create more
jobs and modernisation of railway factories to increase the
capacity.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, July 14, 2011, 23:20