Amrit Bharat Station Scheme remakes 13 Delhi stations

Railways' station-redevelopment programme covers 1,338 stations nationally — and the Minister has now placed Delhi's 13 on record in the Lok Sabha.

What happened

• The Ministry of Railways told the Lok Sabha that under the Amrit Bharat Station Scheme (ABSS), a total of 1,338 stations have so far been identified for redevelopment across the country.
• Of these, 13 stations lie in Delhi: Adarshnagar Delhi, Anand Vihar, Bijwasan, Delhi (Old Delhi), Delhi Cantt, Delhi Sarai Rohilla, Delhi Shahadra, Hazrat Nizamuddin, Narela, New Delhi, Sabzi Mandi, Safdarjung and Tilak Bridge.
• Structural works are completed at four of them — New Delhi, Safdarjung, Bijwasan and Delhi Cantt.
• The reply explained that ABSS works on a master-plan basis with phased implementation, not a one-time facelift — each station gets a long-term redevelopment blueprint.
• It was tabled as a written reply by the Union Minister for Railways, framing station redevelopment as a continuous process dependent on multiple statutory clearances and constrained by brownfield (operating-station) challenges.

Background & context

India runs one of the world's largest railway networks, with roughly 7,000-plus stations, most built in the colonial era and incrementally extended ever since. For decades, station upgradation happened piecemeal — a new foot-over-bridge here, an extra platform shelter there — without a single design vision tying the building, the city around it and the passenger experience together. The Amrit Bharat Station Scheme was framed to replace that scatter-shot approach with a standardised, master-planned model that any station, large or small, could be slotted into.

ABSS was launched by the Ministry of Railways in 2023. It is the operative scheme that absorbed and superseded the earlier station-redevelopment efforts — the 2021-era Adarsh Station Scheme (a smaller amenities-upgrade programme) and the older idea of redeveloping a handful of marquee stations on a public-private, real-estate-monetisation model. Instead of redeveloping a few stations at very high cost, ABSS extended a continuous, scalable redevelopment template to well over a thousand stations at once, with each one getting its own master plan and a phased, need-based rollout rather than a fixed deadline.

The scheme is a central-sector effort run directly by the Ministry of Railways through the zonal railways and their construction wings, rather than a centrally-sponsored scheme cost-shared with the States — Railways funds and executes it itself. Because the stations being rebuilt remain fully operational throughout (trains never stop running), the works are classic brownfield projects, which the reply itself flags as a structural constraint: every change must clear fire-safety, heritage, tree-cutting and, near airports, aviation-height approvals, and must be sequenced around live train operations.

It helps to place ABSS within the wider Railways modernisation push, because UPSC routinely tests aspirants on telling these apart. The same Railways umbrella runs the rolling-stock upgrades — Vande Bharat semi-high-speed train sets and the new affordable Amrit Bharat Express trains — alongside the safety layer, Kavach (the indigenous Automatic Train Protection system that applies brakes if a driver misses a signal). ABSS is the stationary leg of this triad: it does for the platform, concourse and building what Vande Bharat does for the coach and Kavach does for the track. A useful contrast is with the older marquee-station model — the redevelopment of a few flagship stations such as Gandhinagar Capital and Rani Kamlapati (Habibganj) on a real-estate-monetisation, public-private basis. That route delivered a handful of showpiece stations at very high cost per station; ABSS instead spreads a continuous, lower-cost, standardised template across well over a thousand stations, trading marquee scale for reach.

For Prelims

• Full name: Amrit Bharat Station Scheme (ABSS), the Indian Railways' flagship station-redevelopment programme.
• Launched: 2023, by the Ministry of Railways (a central-sector scheme; Railways funds and executes it through the zonal railways).
• Scale: 1,338 stations identified for redevelopment nationally (the figure rises as more are added); 13 of them in Delhi.
• Method: each station gets a long-term master plan, implemented in phases on a continuous basis — not a single fixed-deadline project.
• Master-plan elements (the named components): improved access and circulating areas; two-sided city integration (front and rear of the station knit into the city); upgraded station buildings, waiting halls and toilets; a wider foot-over-bridge / air concourse; lifts, escalators and ramps; better platform surfaces and covers; improved passenger-information systems; executive lounges; ample parking; and multimodal integration with bus, metro and other transport.
• Local economy hook: dedicated kiosks under 'One Station One Product' (OSOP) to showcase and sell region-specific local products at the station.
• Accessibility & sustainability: amenities for Divyangjans (persons with disabilities); environment-friendly and sustainable design solutions; ballastless tracks; and, in the long term, the creation of a city centre at the station.
• Delhi's 13: Adarshnagar Delhi, Anand Vihar, Bijwasan, Delhi (Old Delhi), Delhi Cantt, Delhi Sarai Rohilla, Delhi Shahadra, Hazrat Nizamuddin, Narela, New Delhi, Sabzi Mandi, Safdarjung, Tilak Bridge — with structural works completed at New Delhi, Safdarjung, Bijwasan and Delhi Cantt.
• Constraint named in the reply: redevelopment is a continuous process needing fire, heritage, tree-cutting and airport clearances, complicated by brownfield (live-station) conditions.

What it is NOT — the trap to avoid: The Amrit Bharat Station Scheme is a station-infrastructure programme. It is not the Amrit Bharat Express — a separate item that confuses aspirants and was itself in the news the very same day. The Amrit Bharat Express is a class of affordable, long-distance, fully non-AC push-pull trains (locomotives at both ends) for the common passenger; ABSS rebuilds the stations those trains pull into. Two different "Amrit Bharat" entities under the same Railways umbrella — keep them apart. ABSS is also distinct from the Vande Bharat trains (semi-high-speed train sets) and from Kavach (the indigenous Automatic Train Protection / anti-collision system) — three different railway programmes regularly bundled into one "Indian Railways modernisation" question.

The full station / railway-modernisation set to carry (so "how many of these are correct" survives): (1) ABSS — station redevelopment via master plans, 2023; (2) Adarsh Station Scheme — the earlier, smaller amenities-upgrade programme it absorbed; (3) One Station One Product (OSOP) — local-produce kiosks, a component of ABSS rather than a stand-alone scheme; (4) Vande Bharat — semi-high-speed train sets; (5) Amrit Bharat Express — non-AC push-pull trains for affordable long-distance travel; (6) Kavach — Automatic Train Protection. Of these, only ABSS and the Adarsh Station Scheme are about stations; the rest are about trains or safety systems.

Why it matters

Stations are where the railway meets the city, and for most passengers the station — not the train — is the face of Indian Railways. The problem ABSS addresses is that India's stations had aged unevenly: congested concourses, narrow foot-over-bridges, poor signage, weak last-mile links to metro and bus, and almost no thought given to the city behind the station, which typically faced a neglected goods-yard back. By standardising elements such as the wide air concourse over the platforms, mandatory lifts and escalators, two-sided integration and multimodal links, the scheme tries to convert stations from transit chokepoints into organised urban-mobility nodes.

The design also carries a deliberate economic and equity charge. The One Station One Product kiosks turn footfall into a market for local artisans, weavers and food producers, threading a vocal-for-local idea through the transport network. The insistence on Divyangjan amenities — accessible toilets, ramps, tactile paths, lifts — makes accessibility a design default rather than an afterthought, aligning station infrastructure with the Rights of Persons with Disabilities framework. And the sustainability elements (energy-efficient buildings, environment-friendly solutions, ballastless tracks that cut maintenance) tie a large public-works programme to green-infrastructure goals. The honesty of the reply matters too: by naming the statutory-clearance and brownfield bottlenecks, the Ministry implicitly concedes that station redevelopment is slow and clearance-heavy — a real way-forward and problematisation hook for a Mains answer on infrastructure delivery.

The choice of Delhi as the worked example is itself instructive. A single city carrying 13 ABSS stations shows how the scheme handles a dense, multi-terminal network where passengers routinely switch between long-distance rail, suburban services, the metro and road transport. Stations such as New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin are among the busiest in the country, while Anand Vihar and Bijwasan act as relief terminals taking load off the core; redeveloping them together is meant to rebalance the city's rail traffic rather than upgrade stations in isolation. The reported completion of structural works at New Delhi, Safdarjung, Bijwasan and Delhi Cantt — four of the 13 — is the kind of phased, partial progress the master-plan method is built to produce: the visible building-and-concourse shell goes up first, with finishing, integration and the long-term city-centre layer following in later phases. That phasing is why ABSS deliberately avoids announcing a single completion deadline, and why the Minister frames it as a continuous process rather than a project with an end date.

For Mains