Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said the cost of laying one km of high speed track was 10 to 14 times higher than the construction of a normal railway track.
"We will need Rs 80,000 crore to construct the entire length of the planned high speed tracks," he said replying a supplementary during question hour.
Prabhu said Indian Railways currently does not have any high speed corridor and such corridors identified for pre-feasibility studies included Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi-Patna, Howrah-Haldia, Chennai-Bengaluru- Coimbatore-Ernakulum-Thiruvananthapuram.
"A joint feasibility study for Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed corridor co-financed by India and Japan, which started in December 2013, is targeted for completion in June 2015," he said.
The Minister said a provision of Rs 33 crore (Rs 330 million) was made in the last Railway Budget for a study of Diamond Quadrilateral and other high speed rail corridors and Rs 40 crore (Rs 400 million) has been proposed in the current budget 2015-16 for it.
"A provision of Rs 19 crore (Rs 190 million) has been included for feasibility study of Mumbai Ahmedabad High Speed Railwa Corridors in the Railway Budget 2015-16," he said.
Presently, the maximum speed is 150 kmph of Shatabdi Express on the Delhi-Agra section while the average speed of Mail and Express trains in India in 2013-14 was 50.6 kmph.
Replying to another question, Prabhu said there were 80 train accidents in 2014-15 till February 2015 in which 123 people lost their lives and 335 injured. In 2013-14, there were 71 train accidents in which 54 people were killed and 119 were injured.
It has been found that in 2014-15, 57 accidents took place due to failure of railway staff, which was 50 in 2013-14.
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