The World Bank Board approved USD 650 million towards the third loan for the Indias’s Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) to support the construction of the freight-only rail line.
The Eastern Corridor is 1,840 km long and extends from Ludhiana to Kolkata. The World Bank is supporting the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (EDFC) as a series of projects in which the three sections with a total route length of 1,146 km will be delivered sequentially, but with considerable overlap in their construction schedules.
EDFC 3, approved on June 30, 2015, will build the 401 km Ludhiana-Khurja section in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab. The Project will help increase the capacity of these freight-only lines by raising the axle-load limit from 22.9 to 25 tons and enable speeds of up to 100 km/hr. It will also help develop the institutional capacity of the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd (DFCCIL) to build and maintain the DFC infrastructure network.
The first loan of USD 975 million for the 343 km Khurja-Kanpur section in the EDFC program was approved by the World Bank Board in May 2011 and is already under implementation. So far it has awarded contracts worth USD 700 million for this section. The second loan of USD 1.1 billion for EDFC2 which covers 402 km from Kanpur to Mughal Sarai was approved by the World Bank in April 2014. Under EDFC2, civil works contract for about USD 800 million has been awarded and contracts worth about USD 240 million, for establishing rail systems, are under procurement.
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