Cabinet Clears Rs 20,804 Crore of Railway Multitracking: 1,196 Km Across Nine States

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs cleared eight railway multitracking projects on 9 September 2026, worth Rs 20,804 crore across roughly 1,196 route km and nine states. For anyone who owns or hires out earthmoving plant, the headline is not the interesting number. Rs 17.4 crore per km is. That is about a quarter below the rate the same committee sanctioned for rail multitracking three weeks ago, and the gap tells you what kind of work is actually coming.

What the Cabinet approved

Both decisions came out of the same sitting, chaired by the Prime Minister, and were carried the same afternoon by Pragativadi and Prameya News on the eastern package and by Tripura Star News on the southern one, with the rail trade site HelloRail putting the two together. The arithmetic ties in four separate places: the costs sum to Rs 20,804 crore, the route lengths to 1,196 km, the districts to 31 and the states to nine. The five southern project lengths also add up exactly to the stated 540 km.

What does the per-km rate tell an equipment buyer?

Side by side, the eastern set works out near Rs 16.4 crore per km and the southern near Rs 18.6 crore, against Rs 23 crore per km on the four-project rail package cleared in August that we covered at the time. Neither figure is a pure civil rate, since signalling, overhead equipment and land sit inside both, so treat them as a rough classifier rather than a budget.

What drags this batch down is scope. More than half the southern kilometres, the 147 km Hosur to Omalur and the 159 km Salem to Karur to Dindigul stretches, are plain doubling: one more line beside an existing single line, largely on land the railway already holds. That is thin, long, repetitive formation work rather than the structure-heavy 3rd and 4th line jobs in congested port and coal corridors that pushed the August rate up.

The fleet that follows is predictable. Borrow pits and cuttings pull 20-tonne class excavators and tippers; embankment and blanket layers pull single-drum vibratory soil compactors and tandem rollers from the compactor range; formation trimming is motor grader work repeated over hundreds of kilometres. Bridges and road overbridges bring in cranes for girder erection, and drains, cable trenching and utility diversion keep a backhoe loader busy throughout.

The catch is where the machines have to stand. Multitracking happens on the cess beside a live, heavily used running line. Traffic blocks decide when you can work, and the working width plus overhead line clearance caps how big a machine you can put there at all. A rupee of multitracking spend therefore buys fewer machine hours per day than the same rupee on a greenfield alignment, which favours hiring over buying trackside. Borrow areas and bridge substructures are open sites and behave normally, and that is where an owned fleet earns its keep.

Our take: the second-order signal may matter more than the civil work. Kharagpur to Jharsuguda, and both Pendra Road projects, sit in the Mahanadi and South East Central coal belt; Ghatkesar to Kazipet runs through Telangana’s coal and cement traffic. Evacuation capacity has been the binding constraint on despatch from several of those loading points, and 74 MTPA of extra path is a demand signal for mining fleets at the pit end as much as for civil plant along the track. Worth noting too that Katni to Pendra Road and Bilaspur to Pendra Road converge on the same junction, so one hire fleet based around Bilaspur could serve both.

FAQ

What is railway multitracking?

It means adding one or more parallel lines to a route that already has track, usually a 3rd or 4th line on a busy corridor or a second line on a single-line section. The alignment and much of the land already exist, so the work is mostly formation earthwork, blanketing, ballast and bridges rather than a new corridor from scratch.

When can contractors bid for this work?

Not yet. The Cabinet decision sanctions the money; the zonal railways and executing agencies then break the routes into packages and tender them. On comparable sanctions that process has run 12 to 18 months, so the realistic window for bidding is 2027 onward, with completion targeted at 2029-30 for the eastern set.

Which states get the work?

Nine in total. West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in the eastern package, and Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana in the southern one, covering 31 districts between them.

Related on DesiMachines: Cabinet Clears Rs 13,041 Crore of Rail and Road Work: 410 km of Multitracking Plus NH-22 Four-Laning

Source: HelloRail