Kishan Reddy meets Ashwini Vaishnaw over Hyderabad high-speed rail corridors

New Delhi: The Centre has clarified that alignment studies for three proposed high-speed rail corridors linked to Hyderabad are underway and that it has not sent any land acquisition requisitions to the concerned State governments.

After meeting Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw here to discuss the Hyderabad-Chennai, Hyderabad-Bengaluru and Hyderabad-Pune high-speed rail corridors, Union Coal Minister G Kishan Reddy said Vaishnaw had clarified that no land acquisition requisition had been sent to the respective State governments.

“The Hon’ble Railway Minister clarified that no land acquisition requisition has been sent to the respective State governments and that any land acquisition being carried out in the name of High-Speed Rail at this stage is illegal,” Reddy said in a post on X.

He said alignment studies for all three corridors were underway and that details would be shared with the respective State governments and farmers once the alignments were finalised.

The clarification came amid land acquisition efforts by the Telangana government for rail corridors and other projects, which have faced resistance from farmers on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

South Central Railway had also earlier posted the same video on X, saying Vaishnaw held a detailed discussion with Reddy on the proposed alignments for high-speed rail connectivity linking Hyderabad with Chennai, Bengaluru and Pune.

In August, the government said Indian Railways had incurred capital expenditure of over Rs.1.14 lakh crore, or about 39 per cent of the budgetary allocation for 2026-27, by the end of July.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Vaishnaw said the Centre had spent Rs.1,14,973 crore out of the budgetary allocation of Rs.2,93,030 crore for the current financial year. The minister said expenditure on safety-related activities had increased steadily over the years, rising from Rs.39,200 crore in 2013-14 to Rs.1,20,389 crore in 2026-27.

On Kavach, the indigenous Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system, the minister said Version 4.0 had been commissioned over 2,633 route kilometres as of July 31, covering key sections of the high-density Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah corridors.