PERFORMANCE OF RAILTEL

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The RailTel Corporation of India Ltd. (RCIL), a public sector undertaking of the Ministry of Railways, incorporated on September 26, 2000, has now reached take-off stage.

During the current financial year (2002-2003), RailTel has already earned Rs. 5.22 crores by leasing of bandwidths and other telecom infrastructure. It has commitments of another Rs. 7.2 crores.

The revenue projection of RailTel during 2003-2004 has been pegged at Rs. 100 crores.

RailTel will be completing 15,000 route kilometres network in 2003-2004, wherein 150 important cities and 1500 stations will be connected on Optical Fibre network.

The Railways have, so far, built up a total of 10,000 route kilometres of Optic Fibre Cable (OFC) network.

OFC linking of four metro cities of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai, is in progress and is to be completed by June 2003. This will improve considerably communication on the Golden Quadrilateral and its diagonal routes.

In addition, OFC links connecting important cities on Mumbai—Ahmedabad, Lucknow—Kanpur—Allahabad—Mughalsarai—Varanasi—Kolkata—Visakhapatnam, Chennai—Madurai, Delhi—Agra and Bhopal—Itarsi—Jabalpur have been commissioned.