InterRail India Pvt. Ltd., registered in Mumbai, the youngest affiliate of the InterRail Group, has successfully completed its first year of business as an independent, operative company. "Our experiences from previous activities as a delegation office since 2010 were of help here", said Managing Director Vijay Narayan when presenting results and future projects.
The regional focus of the Indian InterRail company is on CIS traffics, with a strong emphasis on making use of the possibilities offered by rail transport. "As a rule, we handle multi-modal container transports - a combination of rail/road/sea. The containers go from India to the different CIS states or vice versa", Narayan explains. Transport routes vary a lot, owing to political developments. While, before the US policy of sanctions against Iran, for transports between India and the CIS the route via Iran and its ports was generally preferred, accounting for almost 90 % of these transports, now this route has become markedly less used. Only 10 to 15 % of the goods from India to the CIS go via the Persian Gulf ports. Yet there is increased interest in these traffics now that the sanctions are being loosened, says the Managing Director of InterRail India.
In 2013, transport routes via the Baltic ports, the Chinese ports, the Mediterranean and Black Sea ports had become more and more interesting for customers in India with exports to the CIS. Due to current events, demand for routes via the Black Sea and the Mediterranean ports has decreased.
As InterRail India has already become known on the market as a specialist for CIS markets, the first air freight shipment was handled recently, and the company has also very successfully entered the highly demanding project sector by transporting circa 160 tons of equipment from India to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
As to further strategies, InterRail India intends to establish a network of branch offices. Plans are, in a first step, to open in New Delhi, the capital of India, an office specifically designated for handling shipments in the Northern corridor, and another one in Southern India for goods transports in the Southern corridor.
"There are well developed rail freight markets in India and the CIS; for the customers of both regions, transports via rail are much more common than here in Europe. Which is why our company with its orientation towards multi-modal transports with a considerable rail freight share fits excellently at the interface between these big rail nations, and opens up far-reaching perspectives", says Hans Reinhard, President of the Board of the InterRail Group Hans Reinhard, delineating what is expected of InterRail India's development.
In India, rail freight transport is to play an even more important role: As to Government aims, the share of rail freight on the goods transport market is to go up to 50 % by 2030, as compared to 30 % in 2010, by means of further investments in infrastructure and rolling stock as well by including the private sector, with the main goal being to make rail transport more efficient, safe, punctual, and competitive.
The Indian Railways, one of the world's biggest railway companies, with a network of circa 64,600 km, transported 1,053.54 million tons of freight in their recent fiscal year (April 2013 to March 2014) - an increase of 4.3 % as compared to the previous fiscal year. At this time, the figures of freight transported are rising at a similar range. Thus, in May 2014, about 91.83 million tons of cargo were transported, a plus of 4.16 % when compared to May 2013. The 2017 target is a transport volume of 1.4 billion tons per year; the completion of the new freight corridors from Delhi to Mumbai and Howrah respectively are to contribute to reaching this aim.
