New Delhi. Indian Railways will spend a major part of its budget allocation on rail safety related activities and automatic train-protection system ‘Kavach’. Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav said this while commenting on the Union Budget 2024-25 on Tuesday. He told reporters that an amount of Rs 2,62,200 crore has been allocated for the railways, which is a record allocation for capital investment.
Vaishnav said, “A large part of this allocation – Rs 1,08,795 crore – is for safety-related activities, such as replacing old tracks with new ones, improving signal systems and building flyovers and underpasses, and installing shields.” He said that among all these safety-related activities, installing shields is at the top of the railways’ priority list. According to the minister, the advanced version of the automatic train-protection system ‘Kavach 4.0’ has recently received approval from the Research Design and Standards Organization. Now it will be rapidly installed in trains.
Vaishnav said that the optical fibre cables comprising the components of Kavach have been laid over a distance of more than 4,275 km and other components like telecom towers, track RFID equipment, station Kavach and loco Kavach are also being installed at a fast pace. Comparing the budgetary allocation for railways during the UPA regime, he said that around 2014, the budgetary allocation for railways used to be only about Rs 35,000 crore and today it has reached a new level of Rs 2.62 lakh crore. He said that this budget takes forward the hard work and goal-oriented approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governance of the last 10 years.
Abolition of angel tax will boost startup ecosystem: Vaishnav
Information Technology (IT) Minister Ashwini Vaishnav on Tuesday said the announcement of abolishing the ‘angel’ tax in the Union Budget is an important milestone. It will boost the startup ecosystem in India. Vaishnav said, “This is a very good decision and has been the biggest demand of deep tech startups. This move will boost investments in startups.” He told reporters after the budget, “Angel tax is a long-standing problem … Deep tech startups had a big problem of how you do valuation.”
The minister said India has made huge progress in domestic manufacturing of mobiles, laptops and servers and the focus is now on promoting component manufacturing. He said the rule-making process under the Data Protection Act (DPDP Act) is “in the final stages, and we will soon put the rules out for consultation with the public and stakeholders.”