India Wired 21,801 km of Railway Before 2014. Then It Wired 48,000 km More in 12 Years.

In the financial year 2023-24, Indian Railways strung overhead wires along 7,188 route kilometres of track. That is about 19.7 kilometres every day of the year, Sundays and Diwali included.

Between 2004 and 2014, the average was about 1.42 kilometres a day. At the 2023-24 pace, a week of work covered roughly what the old pace managed in three months.

A route kilometre is simply the length of a line on the map, however many tracks run side by side on it. By March 2026, 69,873 of the 70,142 route kilometres on India’s broad gauge network, the wide track its main lines run on, were electrified. That is 99.6 percent. More than two-thirds of that wiring went up after 2014. It is a less photogenic feat than the Chenab bridge, and a far longer one.

Nine decades for the first 21,801 km

India’s first electric train ran in 1925, between Bombay Victoria Terminus and Kurla Harbour, on 1,500 volt direct current. The colonial network had been laid out to carry raw materials to the ports, and in the 22 years from 1925 to independence it electrified 388 route kilometres.

After 1947 the work came in five-year-plan instalments. The railway’s own Year Book for 2013-14 lists 1,810 route kilometres electrified in the plan years 2002 to 2007 and 4,556 in 2007 to 2012. In 2013-14 itself, the figure was 1,350. By March 2014, the Year Book says, 32.84 percent of the whole network had wires.

The ministry’s number for everything done before 2014 is 21,801 route kilometres of broad gauge, which it calls about 60 years of work. Counting from the 1925 line, it took closer to 90.

You will sometimes see “20 percent” quoted as India’s electrified share in 2014, including in a government backgrounder from April 2026. The railway’s own Year Book for that year says 32.84 percent, and that is the figure we use. The jump from a third to nearly all of it is big enough without help.

Then the pace went up fourteenfold

The records came in a run. Until 2020 the best single year was 2018-19, with 5,276 route kilometres. In 2020-21, in the middle of the Covid pandemic, crews did 6,015. In 2023-24 they did 7,188, the 19.7 kilometres a day that opens this piece and about fourteen times the 2004 to 2014 average.

Between 2014 and 2025 the ministry counts 46,900 route kilometres electrified. That is more than double the 21,801 of all the years before.

The machinery changed with the pace. Masts used to stand on foundations dug largely by hand; crews now bore cylindrical foundations with mechanised augers. An automatic wiring train strings the catenary, the supporting cable, and the contact wire the locomotive touches, at the same time and at a controlled tension.

Not every promise held. In April 2021 the ministry said it planned to electrify the entire network by December 2023. It did not. The figure for 2024-25 fell to 2,701 route kilometres, though by November 2024 about 97 percent of the broad gauge already had wires, so there was far less left to do.

The last 269 kilometres

By November 2025, 25 states and union territories were fully electrified. The remaining 574 route kilometres sat in five states: Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Assam and Goa. Assam, at 92 percent, was furthest behind.

By March 2026 the gap was 269 kilometres. The ministry’s explanation for the slow tail, in a written answer to the Lok Sabha in December 2025, lists forest clearances, utilities that have to be moved out of the way, statutory permissions, hard terrain, local law and order, and the number of months in a year that crews can actually work at a given site. Every new line and every added track is now sanctioned with electrification built in.

How India compares, with a caveat

The ministry quotes a June 2025 report by the International Union of Railways, the global rail industry body, for other countries’ electrified share: the United Kingdom 39 percent, Russia 52, France 60, Japan 64, Spain 67, China 82 and Switzerland 100.

Only Switzerland sits higher. One caveat: India’s percentage counts only the broad gauge, and the ministry’s tables do not say whether the foreign figures are measured on the same basis. Treat it as a rough ranking, not a precise one. Rough is still plenty for a network that stood at about a third in 2014.

What the wires change

The first thing is fuel. The ministry says electric traction is about 70 percent more economical than diesel. In 2024-25, it says, electrification saved about 180 crore litres of diesel, or 1.8 billion litres, and it puts the savings from electrification at about ₹6,000 crore, without saying over what period. The Year Book of 2013-14 already gave cutting India’s dependence on imported petroleum as a reason for the programme.

The second is time lost changing engines. When a train runs from an electrified line onto a diesel one, it has to stop and swap locomotives. The 2013-14 Year Book describes one small fix: wiring the 231 kilometres between Kanpur and Jhansi removed the engine changes at both ends, letting electric trains run straight between two trunk routes.

The third is pull, and that is where the factories come in.

Cleaner than the road, and getting cleaner

An electric train is only as clean as the power feeding it, and India’s grid still leans on coal: according to the Ministry of Coal, thermal power has made up more than 74 percent of the country’s electricity over the past decade.

Even so, rail wins easily on carbon. The ministry, citing a 2021 NITI Aayog report, puts rail freight at 11.5 grams of carbon dioxide per tonne per kilometre against 101 grams by road, about 89 percent less.

The railway is also building its own clean supply. Its solar capacity grew from 3.68 megawatts in 2014 to 898 megawatts by November 2025, spread across 2,626 stations and railway land, and 629 megawatts of that goes straight to running trains. The stated target is Net Zero Carbon Emissions for Indian Railways by 2030. Whether it gets there depends less on the wires, which are nearly done, than on what flows through them.

Engines from Chittaranjan and Madhepura

India builds its own locomotives, and in 2024-25 it built a record 1,681 of them. Chittaranjan Locomotive Works in West Bengal made 700. Of the 1,681, only 100 were diesels. The yearly average rose from about 470 locomotives in 2004 to 2014 to about 917 in 2014 to 2024.

The most powerful come from Madhepura in Bihar, a factory run as a joint venture between Indian Railways and the French firm Alstom. On 18 May 2020 the first of its 12,000 horsepower electric freight locomotives made its first commercial run, hauling 118 wagons out of Pt Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction. The ministry said this made India the sixth country to build high-horsepower locomotives at home. One of these engines can start and haul a 6,000 tonne train up a gradient of 1 in 150.

The contract is for 800 of them over 11 years. Alstom delivered the 500th in March 2025 and says the Madhepura engines are close to 90 percent made in India. They use regenerative braking, feeding power back into the wires as the train slows.

Trains with no engine at the front

The Vande Bharat Express goes a step further and drops the locomotive entirely. It is a self-propelled trainset, designed and built at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai with around 90 percent local content. The first one ran on 15 February 2019, from New Delhi to Varanasi, with a design top speed of 160 km/h.

By December 2025, 164 Vande Bharat services were running. Version 3.0 reaches 100 km/h from a standstill in about 52 seconds. None of that works without wires overhead, and that network, a century after the Kurla Harbour line opened, is almost finished.

Diesels for export

India’s factories still build diesels. The Marhowrah diesel locomotive factory in Bihar is exporting 150, built with Wabtec, to haul iron ore for Guinea’s Simandou project, a deal worth over ₹3,000 crore. In June 2025, Banaras Locomotive Works delivered the first two of ten 3,300 horsepower diesel-electrics to Mozambique. At home, the last 269 kilometres without wires sit in five states, waiting on forest clearances and the working season.