While agriculture remained the singular focus across Arun Jaitley's budget speech, infrastructure emerged a main winner of this year's budget. The government has increased allocation in both railways and roads projects in this year's budget.
Infrastructure is the single largest job-creator and growth driver in the economy. So, it was given an all-time high allocation this year for railways and roads ministries, said Jaitley, highlighting that Rs 50 lakh crore is needed for all-round development of infrastructure in the country.
Jaitley said that the government would be enhancing public investment to increase growth of GDP, connect and integrate the nation with a network of roads, airports, railways, ports and inland waterways and to provide good quality services.
One of the highlights of the infrastructure sector push, he said, was that through the online monitoring system of PRAGATI alone, projects worth Rs 9.46 lakh crore had been facilitated and fast-tracked.
For road infrastructure, the finance minister said the Bharatmala Pariyojana had been approved for providing connectivity to interior and backward areas and borders of the country by developing about 35,000 km of roads in Phase-I at an estimated cost of Rs 5,35,000 crore.
He said the government was also confident of completing 9,000-km length of national highways during 2017-18. For this, NHAI was provided a fillip in this budget to raise capital for many of its roads projects. It has allowed NHAI to raise equity from the market for its road assets which have matured, by turning them into Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs).
The national highways regulator NHAI was also given the opportunity in this budget to use "new innovative" monetising methods like the toll, operate and transfer (TOT) and infrastructure investment fund (InvITs).
For railways, Jaitley said that the focus of the government would be on "completing existing projects, strengthening the railway network and enhancing railways' carrying capacity."
He said the capital expenditure of the Railways for 2018-19 had been pegged at Rs 1,48,528 crore with a large part devoted to capacity creation, which involves 18,000 km of line doubling, third and fourth line works and 5,000-km of gauge conversion.
Special allocations for doubling of 90-km railway track in Mumbai and for developing the railway infrastructure in the maximum city alone amounted to Rs 51,000 crore.
Work on the eastern and western dedicated freight corridors was also progressing and railways would be procuring 12,000 wagons, 5,160 coaches and approximately 700 locomotives during 2018-19. A railway university in Vadodara was also announced in this budget, as an extension of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet-project, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train.
On passenger amenities, escalators at railway stations, WiFi and CCTV cameras in trains and stations were promised in the budget.
Jaitley said that railways would start with a station re-development fund to upgrade all stations with more than 25,000 footfall daily. Re-development of 600 major railway stations would be undertaken by the Indian Railway Station Development Co. Ltd.
Not forgetting aviation in budget this year, finance minister Arun Jaitley proposed to expand airport capacity by five times.
“The Airports Authority of India has 124 airports. We propose to expand our airport capacity to handle more than one billion trips a year,” Jaitley said in his budget speech.
Jaitley said that 16 unserved airports have become operational under the UDAN, regional airport re-development scheme in 2017. The budget proposed make all 56 airports operational under the scheme.
