Explained: How Indian Railways Can Deliver On Its Promise Of 400 Vande Bharat Trains

One of the highly ambitious announcements in the 2022-23 Union Budget was about Vande Bharat trains. “Four hundred new-generation Vande Bharat Trains with better energy efficiency and passenger riding experience will be developed and manufactured during the next three years,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman promised in her speech. This was surprising to one and all because the movement on this front over the last three years inspires little confidence. Originally called the Train 18 (since a world class train that was targeted to be indigenously developed by 2018), Vande Bharat was built from design to development in just 18 months by Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai under the leadership of the then general manager Sudhanshu Mani. It was a historic achievement by the ICF team, something even the Indian Railways’ (IR) own board had doubts about. Two trains were built in record time and were delivered in 2018. But after that, no new train has seen the tracks and passengers. It’s a mystery how a team of IR’s own engineers built something from scratch, creating this world-class product (which is a great intellectual property of IR that can even be exported) in record time but somehow it’s manufacturing is stuck for the last three years. In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised 75 Vande Bharat trains in 75 weeks. One-third of the targeted time has passed but no new trains have been delivered yet. Nonetheless, the government has set a big target and it’s better if everyone focused on discussing ways to achieve this rather than being stuck on calling it impossible. And who better than Sudhanshu Mani, creator of the Train 18 aka Vande Bharat Express, to chart this seemingly impractical path, an accusation that he is not unfamiliar with because no one believed that ICF could build such a world-class train until his team delivered it. #VandeBharat #IndianRailways #Train18 #VandeBharatExpress #VandeBharatTrain #Railway Subscribe to Swarajya on YouTube. Get a Swarajya subscription: https://subscriptions.swarajyamag.com... Website: https://swarajyamag.com/ Twitter:   / swarajyamag   Facebook:   / swarajyamag