Chabahar-Zahedan Railway

The Chabahar-Zahedan Railway is a 628-kilometre standard-gauge line traversing Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province, conceived as the inland spine connecting the deep-water port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman to the city of Zahedan near the Afghanistan border. Its legal and diplomatic origin lies in the trilateral framework signed in Tehran on 23 May 2016 by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, which established a transit and transport corridor through Iranian territory. A parallel bilateral Memorandum of Understanding between Iran's Ministry of Roads and Urban Development, through its railway entity, and India's IRCON International envisaged Indian financing and construction support for the railway as the natural extension of India's investment in the Shahid Beheshti terminal at Chabahar. The project sits within India's broader strategic calculus of bypassing Pakistan to reach Afghanistan and Central Asia overland.

Procedurally, the railway was structured as a sequential undertaking layered atop the port development. India first committed to equipping and operating the Shahid Beheshti terminal, formalised in a ten-year operating contract signed in 2018 and subsequently extended in a long-term agreement signed in Tehran on 13 May 2024 between India Ports Global Limited (IPGL) and the Port and Maritime Organisation of Iran. The railway component required IRCON to assess track alignment, supply rolling stock and signalling, and arrange financing reported at roughly USD 1.6 billion, with Iranian Railways (Rai) leading civil construction. The intended workflow was that goods discharged at Chabahar would move by rail to Zahedan, then onward to the Afghan frontier and into the Central Asian rail grid, with the corridor ultimately tying into the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).

Variants of the corridor concept extend the railway's logic beyond Zahedan. Plans contemplated continuation toward Zaranj in Afghanistan, complementing the India-built Zaranj-Delaram highway completed in 2009, and integration with Iran's existing line from Zahedan to Kerman and the national network linking to the Bandar Abbas axis. The corridor was also marketed as a feeder to the INSTC, the multimodal route stretching from Mumbai through Iranian territory to Russia and northern Europe. Iran, for its part, advanced the railway as part of its own internal connectivity programme, electrification and double-tracking ambitions, and its desire to position Chabahar as a commercial rival to Pakistan's Gwadar port developed under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

The contemporary record is marked by Iranian assertions of Indian disengagement. In July 2020, Iranian officials, including statements attributed to the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development, indicated that Tehran would proceed with the railway independently using its National Development Fund, citing delays in Indian financing and equipment delivery. Indian officials disputed framing this as a unilateral exit, attributing slowness to US sanctions exposure and the absence of carve-out clarity. Iranian Railways subsequently reported track-laying progress on segments toward Zahedan. The May 2024 long-term Chabahar port contract between IPGL and Iran's Port and Maritime Organisation reaffirmed Indian commitment to the maritime node even as the railway financing question remained unresolved, drawing a renewed warning from the US State Department regarding sanctions risk for entities transacting with Iran.

The railway must be distinguished from adjacent elements of the same corridor. It is not the Chabahar Port itself, which is the maritime terminal India operates; the railway is the landward connector. It is separate from the INSTC, which is the wider multimodal corridor toward Russia of which the Chabahar route is one branch, the principal historic INSTC artery running through Bandar Abbas. It is also distinct from the Zaranj-Delaram highway, a road link in Afghanistan rather than an Iranian rail asset. Finally, it stands in geopolitical contrast to Gwadar and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the competing Chinese-financed port roughly 170 kilometres east along the same coast.

Controversy centres on three fault lines. First, US sanctions under the Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act and the secondary sanctions regime reimposed after the 2018 US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action chilled Indian financing, despite a narrow humanitarian and reconstruction exemption granted to Chabahar in November 2018 for Afghanistan-bound transit. Second, the Taliban's return to power in Kabul in August 2021 disrupted the Afghan endpoint that gave the corridor much of its rationale, though Iran and the Taliban administration have since discussed transit cooperation. Third, the deepening Iran-China relationship, including a 25-year cooperation agreement signed in March 2021, raised questions about whether Chinese capital might ultimately fill financing gaps India left open.

For the working practitioner, the Chabahar-Zahedan Railway is a case study in the limits of connectivity diplomacy under a sanctions overhang and shifting regional security. It illustrates how a project can advance on the maritime node while stalling on the rail spine, how third-party sanctions can paralyse a bilateral commitment between two states that are not themselves adversaries, and how the strategic value of a corridor is contingent on the political control of its endpoints. For Indian foreign-policy desks it remains the central instrument of overland access to Afghanistan and Central Asia that circumvents Pakistan; for analysts of the Gulf and Indian Ocean it is a barometer of the India-Iran-United States triangulation and of competition with the Gwadar-CPEC axis.