Kumar Rakesh
New Delhi, 2nd July. In the fiscal year 2022-23, Indian Railways maintained the momentum of the previous year, recording the highest monthly freight loading of 125.50 MT in June’22. The incremental loading in June was 12.72 MT, representing an increase of 11.28 percent over the previous best June figures achieved in 2021. With this, Indian Railways has had 22 consecutive months of the highest monthly freight loading ever.
This rise has been driven by an increase in coal loading of 13.19 MT, followed by 1.68 MT in cement and clinker, 1.57 MT in other goods, and 0.64 MT in food grains.
The cumulative freight loading in the first quarter of the year was 379.4 MT, compared to 339.3 MT in 2021-22, representing an incremental loading of 40.09 MT and a 12% increase over the same period last year.
The freight NTKMs (Net tonne kilometres) have increased by 20%, from 63.3 billion in June ’21 to 75.8 billion in June ’22. This is due to an increase in freight leads, which has increased by 7.4 percent in addition to an increase in freight loading. The total number of NTKMs in the first three months increased by 19.8 percent.
One of the key features of the freight performance in June was Indian Railways’ sustained efforts to increase supply of coal to power plants in close coordination with the Ministry of Power and Coal.
The loading of Coal (both domestic and imported) to Power Houses has increased by 15.9 MT in June with 51.2MT Coal being moved to Power houses as against 35.3 MT last year, i.e. a growth of 45%. Cumulatively, in the first quarter of the year IR has loaded more than 34.7 MT extra coal to Power Houses as compared to the same period of last year with a growth of more than 30%.
In terms of the number of rakes of coal loaded per day for Power houses , Indian Railways has moved more than 420 rakes of domestic coal and more than 32 rakes of imported coal on a daily basis over longer distances. This is reflected in increased lead of Thermal coal from 457 Km to 565 Km.
With these consistent efforts, the trend of decreasing coal stocks at power plants has been reversed, and coal stocks at power plants have begun to improve on a regular basis.
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