The government on Wednesday said the Indian Railways have taken up 498 projects of 49,069 km length estimated at Rs 6.75 lakh crore, out of which commissioning of 8,979 km has been achieved and an expenditure of Rs 1.53 lakh crore incurred up to March 2019.

Railway and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha said that currently, Indian Railways have taken up 498 projects of 49,069 km length, costing Rs. 6.75 lakh crore, which are in different stages of planning/sanction/execution.

"Out of this, commissioning of 8,979 km length has been achieved and expenditure of Rs 1.53 lakh crore has been incurred up to March, 2019," he said.

"Based on operational requirement, a thorough review of enhancement projects has been carried out and with focused approach, 58 projects have been prioritized into super critical projects, 68 critical projects and 130 other throughout enhancement projects".

Elaborating on the projects, Goyal said, "Currently, the balance length of super critical projects is 2,347 km, 5,676 km for critical projects and 9,703 km for other doubling projects."

Commenting on monitoring of work of the projects, Goyal said, in the overall interest of the nation and to ensure that projects are completed in time without cost overrun, a lot of monitoring is done in railways at various levels such as field level, divisional level, zonal level and Board level and regular meetings are held with the officials of state government and other authorities to resolve the pending issues.

"To ensure that projects are completed even before time, railways has adopted the concept of incentives to the contractor in the form of bonus clause in contracts which will further enhance the pace of execution of projects," he said.