PRESIDENT TO LAY FOUNDATION STONE
FOR HARNAUT RAIL COACH OVERHAULING PROJECT ON MAY 30
The President will
lay the foundation stone for a state-of-the-art Rail Coach Maintenance
(Rail Karkhana) Project at Harnaut in Nalanda district of Bihar
on May 30, 2003 at a function to be presided over by the Chief
Minister of Bihar, Smt. Rabri Devi, with Railway Minister Shri
Nitish Kumar and two Ministers of State for Railways Shri Bandaru
Dattatraya and Shri A.K. Moorthy present, among other VIPs, on
the occasion.
Harnaut Rail Karkhana
Project was announced by the Union Railway Minister Shri Nitish
Kumar in his Railway Budget 2003-2004 speech in the Lok Sabha
on February 26, 2003.
To be set up at a
sanctioned cost of Rs. 98.74 crores, the Project will have capacity
for periodic overhauling of 600 coaching vehicles per year expandable
to 1200 in future. It will have an area of 64 acres with workforce
strength of 1000.
The coach repair
facility, a state-of-the-art facility, will be built with the
latest concept of integrated maintenance for overhauling all types
of coaches.
The layout will involve
placement of coaches in a central shop with several gangs carrying
out repair activity in parallel. The sub-assemblies will be carried
away to separate ancillary shops located n the vicinity and brought
back after repairs through mechanized material handling. Besides,
total time required for repair of coaches will reduce.
The workshop will
be equipped with the latest information technology set up with
local area network for production control and management.
The Coach Repair
Factory will meet the combined shortfall of 750 coaches per annum
in three Zonal Railways, Eastern Railway, East Central Railway
and South Eastern Railway for their periodic overhaul. It will
be third repair workshop between Alam Bagh Lucknow Workshop and
Lilhua Workshop of Kolkata, located between Patna and Baraumi.
At present, there
are 43 workshops for periodic overhaul with 1.7 lakh employees
and annual budget of Rs. 2600 crores. Out of this, 21 workshop
undertake periodic overhaul of passenger coaches on broad gauge.
The rest is for wagons. Harnaut Rail Coach Karkhana will be the
22nd Workshop for periodic overhaul of rail coaches.
Indian Railways have
6,800 locomotives both electric and diesel, 33,000 coaches and
202,466 wagons on broad gauge system alone. Besides, there are
six production units, which meet most of rolling stock requirements.
