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Despite the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, South Central Railway (SCR) has achieved a major milestone in freight revenue for the financial year 2021-22.

The SCR recorded freight revenues of Rs 10,000 crore between April 2021 and March 17, 2022.

Sanjeev Kishore, General Manager, SCR, said that conscious efforts in capturing new traffic and in improving the existing traffic resulted in loading 112.51 million tonnes of freight during this period.

With growth in freight loading witnessed across the entire freight segment, and all commodities witnessing higher loading levels, Kishore attributed the growth to relentless efforts of SCR officials to attract freight business towards Railways.

This combined with continuous monitoring of the movement of freight trains has helped in increasing revenues by 17.7 per cent and loading by 17.3 per cent, as compared to the 2020-21 financial year.

The major contributors for SCR's growth are commodities such as coal with loading of 53.78 metric tonnes (MTs), cement with 32.339 MTs, food grains with 7.980 MTs, fertilisers with 5.925 MTs, container services with 2.137 MTs, and raw materials for steel plants with 4.14 MTs.

Other commodities such as alumina powder, fly ash, granite and sugar contributed 5.80 MTs.

The introduction of various freight incentive schemes and enhancement of freight handling facilities, including infrastructure at several way-side stations, helped in registering robust growth in both freight revenue and loading.

In addition, the newly-formed business development units (BDUs) at both divisional and zonal level have contributed its might in improving the zonal freight basket, an SCR release noted.