Green Railways By 2030

In order to reduce its carbon footprint, the entire Indian Railways network will be electrified by 2023. It will also instal 20GW of solar power by 2030

-  Ashutosh Kumar

INDIAN RAILWAYS moves 24 million passengers every day — a shade less than the population of Australia — on 13,000 trains, around 67,956 kilometres across the sub-continent. Add to that another 3.3 million tonnes of freight — 1,200 million tonnes during 2020/21 — daily, and the fuel needs are immense. As a result, the carbon footprint of the Indian Railways is mammoth. According to the railway ministry, the national transporter consumed 115.45 lakh kilo litres of high-speed diesel between 2014/15 and 2018/19. But, change is happening and that too rapidly.

In 2019/20, 43 per cent of passenger traffic was hauled by diesel locomotives, and 57 per cent by electric traction. That’s a sharp change from 2000/01 when diesel locomotives handled 56.1 per cent of passenger traffic and electric traction was much lower at 43.9 per cent. In freight, electric traction accounted for 64.7 per cent of the traffic in 2019/20 against 56.5 per cent in 2000/01. Diesel has fallen from 43.5 per cent to 35.3 per cent during the period.

Things are expected to alter dramatically over the next 10 years. In August 2020, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal tweeted that “by 2030, we will be a net-zero railway, our carbon emission will be zero… Ours will be the first railways of this scale to go green”.