The Minister of Railways, Shri Lalu Prasad Yadav announced the Interim Railway Budget 2009-2010 on 13 February. The Railways will invest Rs.2,30,000 crore under the 11th Five Year Plan with an aim to increase the transport capacity of the Railways and to reduce the unit cost of operations. Indian Railways (IR) will be completing the work of 4900 km of gauge conversion, 1800 km of doubling and laying 1100 km of new lines in a span of five years.

During the year 2009-2010, IR will construct nine Railway Over Bridges (ROBs) and Railway Under Bridges (RUBs) on fifty-fifty cost sharing basis. Palej, Panoli, Kosamba and Kim in Surat and Bharuch districts of Gujarat, Roshanara Garden and Sultanpuri in Delhi, Shastrinagar and Model Town of Ludhiana in Punjab and Vasarpadi in Tamil Nadu will be considered on priority for construction of ROBs and RUBs.

Lalu Prasad Yadav, Railway Minister also said that a pre-feasibility study to run a bullet train between Delhi and Patna will be started soon. This is in addition to the bullet train proposals between Delhi-Amritsar, Ahmedabad-Mumbai-Pune, Hyderabad-Vijayawada-Chennai, Chennai-Bangalore-Ernakulam and Howrah-Halida which were announced in 2007- 08 Railway Budget. The action for examining feasibility study is already on for these routes.

The complete speech of Interim Railway Budget