Rlys to hand over surplus land to exploit commercial potential

The Railway Ministry is all set to hand over surplus lands at 25 locations around the country to the newly-constituted Rail Land Development...

The Railway Ministry is all set to hand over surplus lands at 25 locations around the country to the newly-constituted Rail Land Development Authority RLDA in a bid to devise strategies to commercially exploit land and airspace available near existing railway infrastructure.

The sites which will be taken up by the RLDA first will include locations at New Delhi, Kolkata, Vishakhapatnam, Gwalior, Kanpur, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Nagpur, Coimbatore and Ahmedabad. At RLDA8217;s second Board meeting today, Railway Board Chairman JP Batra assured that the first group of sites for development of vacant railway lands will be entrusted to RLDA very soon.

Informed sources said that after these 25 sites are handed over to RLDA they will first update the market feasibility studies done in the past on these sites and also determine which sites required fresh studies.

8220;The market studies will tell us the best alternatives available for commercial development at these sites and will also throw up figures on the minimum amounts that can be realised from them. Once this exercise is through, the sites will be put up for bidding,8221; a senior RLDA official told The Indian Express.

Initially, the Railways have broadly identified 61sites which can be used for commercial purposes. The remaining sites will be taken up in the next lot with RLDA given the mandate to extend passenger amenities through construction of food plazas, shopping malls, and hotels on surplus vacant land available with the Railways.

Out of the 4.23 lakh hectares of land it owns, Indian Railways are seeking to commercially develop 43,000 hectares of vacant land, which they are not going to require for operational purposes for the next few years.

With RLDA in place, the Railways are hoping to speed up things by letting RLDA officials pursue cases related to commercial development and performing functions like interaction with local authorities and getting surveys done.