Railways transformed in a decade, says Ashwini Vaishnaw; bats for ‘performance politics’

New Delhi: Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Tuesday that the Narendra Modi government has initiated performance-based politics in the country instead of the politics of vote bank.

Replying to a discussion on the railway ministry's demand for grants in the Lok Sabha, Vaishnaw said the government has brought big changes in the railways in the past decade and worked on all dimensions of the sector. The Lok Sabha passed the ministry's ₹2.78 lakh crore demands for grant for 2026-27 after two-days of discussion.

In his over-one-hour-long reply, Vaishnaw-also the minister for electronics and information technology and information and broadcasting-said the government is giving an annual subsidy of ₹60,000 crore on rail fares, with a 45% concession to each passenger to make rail tickets affordable. "Rail fares in Japan and Europe are 20% more expensive than in India," he said. The fares have remained lower despite the significant improvement in the quality of Indian Railways across all parameters, he added.


The government has sanctioned 27,000 km of railway projects worth ₹4.27 lakh crore since 2014, Vaishnaw said. "These projects will lay the foundation for growth and development over the next 20-30 years and the country will benefit for the next 50 years," he said.

Talking about the progress of India's first bullet train project between Ahmedabad and Mumbai, Vaishnaw said work is in full swing and the first section of the project will be commissioned in 2027.