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After achieving excellent growth in passenger and freight earnings, Indian Railways is now poised for innovative efforts to boost sundry earnings which include earnings from parcel, leasing of railway space for advertising and publicity etc. With a view to double or triple the parcel earnings, the Ministry of Railway has called upon all the Zonal Railways to go for maximum utilization of available capacity, even at less than normal rates for not so popular trains. Indian Railways have an annual parcel carrying capacity of around 25-30 million tonnes, of which hardly 25% capacity is presently being utilized. A communication sent to the General Managers of all Zonal Railways says that despite having the immense potential, the Railway parcel earnings are around Rs. 500 crores, which is not even a small fraction of the potential. Indian Railways have already announced a number of initiatives, namely leasing of rear SLR of popular trains, front guard room (to courier companies) and SLRs of unpopular trains at a reserve price equal to last year’s actual earnings plus 20% through competitive bidding.
All the Zonal Railways have been asked to make concerted and innovative efforts to grow earnings from advertisement and publicity contracts by 10 to 20 times by adopting a strategy for wholesale leasing of stations/group of stations/divisions through a process of open competitive bidding to a professional agency, rather than retail leasing of individual hoardings. Indian Railways being the single largest land/air space for advertising and publicity, carry around 6000 million passengers every year and it has 12000 million eyeballs of these passengers apart from billions of eyeballs of parsons other than passengers. The Ministry observed that the advertisements and publicity contracts for Rajdhani/Shatabdi, Mail/Express trains alone can generate revenues which would be many times more than last year’s total earnings.
The Ministry has requested all GMs to ensure that all tender notices concerning parcel and sundry earning contracts are issued within a period of 15 days and the tenders are finalized within a period to two months. Also the license fee of all the on-going earnings contracts like catering, PCO/STD, parking, commercial utilization of land/building etc. should be revised keeping in view their true potential.
BSK/HK/TR
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