SAIL, Railways sign LTTC agreement

Shashank Shekhar

Bokaro ( Jharkhand) : Steel Authority of India Ltd. (SAIL) and Indian Railways reached a strategic agreement on Long Term Tariff Contract (LTTC) on August 29, 2017. The agreement was signed in the presence of senior officers of Railways and SAIL at the office of CCM of SE Railways at Kolkata. The agreement was inked by Kaushik Mukhopadhyay, CCM, SE Railways, on behalf of Railways, and Debabrata Maiti, GM (Rail Movement) on behalf of SAIL.The agreement will be valid for a period of three years.

SAIL is one of the premier customers of Indian Railways, having a rail coefficient of over 95%. This agreement involves as many as 15 zones of Indian Railways for loading and unloading goods at different terminals with different commodities applicable to LTTC, viz, Iron & Steel, Pig Iron, Slag, Limestone, Dolomite, Manganese Ore etc. with a Benchmark Gross Freight Revenue (BGFR) of Rs 3,417.74 crore. At present this is the highest LTTC agreement in terms of Gross Freight Revenue of Railways.

SAIL is on the verge of completion of a major modernisation programme at its different steel plants and is expected to attain substantial incremental growth. SAIL expects that infrastructural improvement at loading and unloading areas will reduce the detention and thereby improve the overall turnaround time of railway wagons in the future.  As such, LTTC agreement will be mutually beneficial to both the organisations.