Federal Minister for Finance Senator Mohammad Ishaq Dar has said that the commercialisation of track will make Pakistan Railways a profit-earning organisation to contribute to the national economy, WealthPK reports. Addressing the inaugural ceremony of the Green Line Train Project here, he said the scheme would be completed at a cost of about $11 billion to $12 billion under the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). He congratulated Federal Minister for Railways Khawaja Saad Rafiq for reviving the impressive Green Line Railway service. He highlighted the importance of commercialising the railway track.

He said that it would not only help Pakistan Railways to stand on its own feet but would also make it a profit-earning organisation to contribute to the national economy. The finance minister also underlined the importance of utilising railways for freight transport, saying it could minimise transport cost to a great extent. He said that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was meeting many challenges. He expressed the hope that he would pull the country out of the present quagmire. Speaking on the occasion, Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal termed railways the backbone of the national economy. He said that the development of railways was directly linked with economic uplift.

He said that the ML-1 railway project under CPEC was launched in 2017-18 to modernise the railway sector in Pakistan besides increasing the speed of the trains up to 160 kilometres per hour. He said that the economy of the country must have to be based on export-led growth. He said that it was needed to increase exports from the current $32 billion per year to more than $100 billion within a few years. The planning minister said Pakistan was paying a price for the global carbon emissions due to which the country had to bear losses of more than $30 billion after disastrous flooding last year.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk