FM gives a budget grant for railways (try to recall Mamata crying in Parliament for getting additional funds from FM) each year and railways use their own funds for projects. We can see the different funds such as CAP, DF, EBR etc mentioned in Budget Pink book.
Now Institutional Funding (EBR IF) seems to have become almost greater than 60% of money spent by Railways. They borrow it from LIC etc at 9.5%. Does that % looks good.
What happened to the money spent earlier for Infra and why now almost all are...
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spent using IF.
LIC has just given some 3000 Crores in 1.5 Years after signing MoU with railways for granting 1.5 Lakh in 5 Years. That's the confidence LIC has with RM.
As per RM's vision they need 8.5 Lakh crore for 5 years. Other than LIC no one came forward in the last 1 year to sign MoU with railways.

Correct. Who is going to take the corrective action?
Earlier RM's were populist politicians so for vote bank politics they did it.
Is it healthy to do the same now?
The change we see in the last 3-5 years is decrease in Passengers so corrective action needs to be taken sooner than later.
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now railways borrows at 9.5%. How it will be viable to pay high interest and principal going forward added by this government without improvement in operations.
In 2003 Nellai did MS-TEN in 11 Hrs 25 Mins with no second line after CGL.
Now the same Nellai does MS-TEN in 11 Hrs 50 Mins.
Now the section has seen almost 250+ KMS doubled+completely electrified+high power WAP 7 loco. So, speed should be increased journey time has to be reduced to save on operations. Railways now running suvidha with 45-50 KMPH Avg Speed much slower than current SF trains. TT should be revampled completely in most sections like it was done during Lalu whe he came up with SF concept of increasing most trains speed by 55 KMPH. So, now if they plan to make SF speed bench mark as 60/65 KMPH the time saved will translate to good cost savings and all unwanted stops should be scrapped and tis can bring in total cost saving of 10K crores annually.
Travel time by road has decreased by more than 25% now. Train speed decreased.
2003 ticket was very cheap compared now. Road was not good like now. People affordability has increased now. More peoples have car for adhoc trips.