Morbi district is getting another rail freight terminal, and this time the railways will not spend a rupee building it. Western Railway’s Ahmedabad Division has handed Emirates Logistics India Private Limited a 35-year contract to develop a Gati Shakti Cargo Terminal on 80,413 square metres of railway land at Khakharechi, the division announced on November 6. Maritime Gateway and DeshGujarat carried the details, as did IANS.
A new contract model on railway land
Khakharechi is the Ahmedabad Division’s first project under Schedule-II of the Gati Shakti Cargo Terminal Policy 2026 issued by the Railway Board. Emirates Logistics funds the whole build. In return, the railways collect an annual land licence fee of more than Rs 15 lakh plus a share of revenue, IANS reported, via hiindia. Over the full term, that floor fee alone adds up to more than Rs 5.25 crore before any revenue share, assuming no escalation; none of the reports gives an escalation clause or the revenue-share percentage.
For Western Railway, the deal adds freight capacity without touching its own capital budget. For the operator, it secures a rail-linked site in an industrial district for 35 years. Neither the commissioning date nor the planned annual handling capacity has been disclosed.
Devaliya opened two months ago
The award comes soon after another private terminal opened in the district. Western Carriers (India) commissioned its 42-acre terminal at Devaliya near Morbi, and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw flagged off a bulk tiles train from it on September 15, 2026, Logistics Insider and Maritime Gateway reported. The same day he dedicated terminals at Shivlakha and Bhimasar in Kutch and Chandisar in Banaskantha, and launched work on one at Linch in Mehsana.
At roughly 19.9 acres, Khakharechi’s plot is a little under half the size of Devaliya’s. Western Carriers says Morbi produces about 5 million tonnes of ceramic products a year and meets more than 80% of India’s domestic demand, and it pitched Devaliya at both the tile makers and the Maliya salt belt. The Khakharechi announcement does not name the cargo it expects. Across the division, the terminals already running move salt and bentonite, cement and fertiliser, sugar, pulses and containers.
The freight numbers behind the push
Between April and October 2026, those eight terminals handled more than 23 lakh tonnes of freight across over 1,700 rakes and 65,000 wagons, earning the division more than Rs 330 crore, according to the figures released with the announcement. That works out to an average of about 1,350 tonnes a rake. Khakharechi becomes the ninth terminal in that count once it opens.
Sources: Maritime Gateway, DeshGujarat, IANS via hiindia, Logistics Insider
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.