In a year of tepid freight traffic, goods ferried via the Indian Railways registered a growth of 1.5 per cent during October to 131 million tonnes (mt), according to railways ministry data.

       In contrast, the railways had achieved a cargo growth of 8.5 per cent in October 2023.

       According to officials, coal traffic on the railway network increased by 4.3 per cent in the previous month. The commodity accounts for 50 per cent of the total freight volumes of the railways, and is expected to fetch the national transporter Rs 91,000 crore in 2024-25, according to government estimates.

       The previous month was also the hottest October in over a century. Volumes of containers grew by 7.7 per cent in the previous month, while miscellaneous goods and clinker traffic increased by 7 per cent each.

       So far in this financial year (FY25), freight volumes on Indian Railways stand at 906.9 mt, which is merely 2.2 per cent higher than the previous year.

       In the commodity mix, key materials like coal have registered a 6 per cent growth in the current financial year, while iron ore (second largest by volume) traffic has grown by 1.1 per cent.

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       Container volumes across the financial year have grown by 3.3 per cent, and miscellaneous goods – a benchmark for the railways' efforts at freight basket diversification - have remained flat at 0.9 per cent.

       According to officials, significant capacity augmentation activity is the focus right now, when mobility on the railway network generally tends to lag on account of new construction. The Union Cabinet, in the past few weeks, has also sanctioned a number of major expansion projects to increase capacity.

       The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) anticipates freight traffic on railways to rise year-on-year by 3.3 per cent in 2024-25. “This is quite a deceleration compared to the 15 per cent rise seen in 2021-22, 6.6 per cent rise in 2022-23, and a 5.2 per cent growth registered in the previous financial year,” it said in a forecast in October.

       The ministry is eyeing Rs 1.8 trillion from its freight operations this financial year, which is 6.5 per cent higher than the revised estimates, but the same as the budget estimates in the previous year.

       Experts have opined in the past that the national transporter registering tepid freight growth, which is the primary revenue generator used to subsidise passenger travel, does not augur well for its Mission 3000, under which it aims to carry 3000 mt of goods by 2030.

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