The Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal in the Rajya Sabha on Friday said that the government has no plans to discontinue the manufacture of Vande Bharat Express in the country.
Goyal was answering a question asked by Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut.
“The Integral Coach Factory (ICF), a departmental Production Unit of Indian Railways, has so far produced two ‘Vande Bharat’ train sets consisting of 16 coaches each. These train sets are the first two prototypes with ultra-modern facilities,” Goyal said in a written reply.
“These being prototypes, it is not possible to ascertain their exact cost at this stage including various overheads, especially as ICF also produced over 3,000 other coaches in 2018-19,” he said.
“Indian Railways is planning to produce 40 ‘Vande Bharat’ rakes and it would be possible to determine the exact cost of manufacturing during their production,” the minister said.
The first Vande Bharat was launched on the New Delhi-Varanasi route from February 2019, while the other on the New Delhi-Katra route from October 2019.
Trains on both the routes faced some technical glitches raising questions about the sustainability of the train.