The Pink Book — once the definitive annual guide to Indian Railways’ project spending — is now gone in its consolidated form, forcing researchers to piece together data from multiple zonal documents.

The Railway ‘Pink Book’ is gone in its regular consolidated format For decades, the Indian Railways’ annual “Pink Book” served as the most detailed public record of the railway budget, listing every sanctioned project—from new lines and track doubling to electrification, workshops and station upgrades. But the iconic document has now effectively disappeared in its traditional form.

Beginning with the 2024-25 financial year, the Ministry of Railways stopped issuing a single consolidated pink book that compiled project-wise allocations for the entire network. Instead, the information is now being released through separate zone-wise budget documents, listing works for individual zonal railways and production units.

Now, these documents, typically titled “List of Works” or “Consolidated Budget Statements,” are uploaded individually for zones such as Central Railway, Western Railway and others on official railway portals. The shift means that instead of referring to one national compendium, researchers and journalists must now consult multiple files across different railway zones to piece together the full picture.

The ‘Pink Book’ had long been considered the most detailed railway budget document, providing project-wise allocations and updates that were widely used by policymakers, analysts and transport reporters tracking infrastructure spending.

The change is seen as part of the broader restructuring of railway finances that followed the 2017 merger of the Railway Budget with the Union Budget, after which several legacy railway budget publications gradually lost prominence or were reformatted.

While the data on sanctioned works and allocations continues to be published, the discontinuation of the consolidated Pink Book format has made it harder to obtain a single, nationwide snapshot of Indian Railways’ capital works in one place, something the Pink Book historically provided.