India
A decade after decision, wheels set in motion with first acquisition
Updated : Dec 02, 2018, 05:06 AM IST
After ten years, the National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRL) completed its first land acquisition in Thane district a day ago. Coincidentally, on Friday itself, even in Gujarat, a NRI octogenarian from Germany handed over her ancestral land in Gujarat for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project.
Savita Ben, who runs an Indian restaurant in Germany, is originally from Chansad village and had shifted abroad 33 years ago after getting married.
But that is where the Bullet Train glory ends. It has been almost a decade since the decision to run bullets trains in India was first discussed. It was in December 2009, under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-2 government, that the Ministry of Railways had presented a white paper named 'Vision 2020' in the Parliament, which had around six routes (Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Kolkata (via Lucknow), Mumbai-Chennai, Delhi-Nagpur part of Delhi-Chennai route, Mumbai-Nagpur part of Mumbai-Kolkata route and Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysuru).
In 2015, talks for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route resurfaced on a serious note. After a feasibility study, talks began with Japan and it was concluded that the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) would fund about 80 per cent of the project that will come in form of an ODA (official development assistance).
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Construction work at few locations, in form of preparing designs for stations and tendering them, started in December 2017 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducted Bhoomipujan for the same in September 2017. The project was launched by PM Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe in September last year.
The bullet train is supposed to have 12 stations across the 500-km stretch. The target, initially, was 1,400 hectares of land from Gujarat and Maharashtra, out of which 1,120 hectares is privately-owned.
Commencement of work on Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor has opened up the possibility of many such corridors as India tries to shed the image of its rickety railways that continues to remain substandard on most parameters. Nevertheless, till the time results come, the Railway ministry has started looking at other viable high-speed corridor options. One such option is Chennai-Bengaluru-Mysuru corridor, whose feasibility has already been completed and handed over to the Railways by a German team of engineers.
A key finding of the report claims that the 435-km corridor will be a success and will be advantageous by cutting down the travel time and requiring minimum land acquisition. Pegged at $16 billion or Rs 1.14 lakh crore, it is expected to reduce the travel time to just 2 hours and 25 minutes. To be funded majorly by the German Consortium, the corridor is expected to recover its cost in 25 years, mainly through the fare price.
The other high-speed corridors that can be considered are — New Delhi- Kolkata and Nagpur - Mumbai. However, railway officials say it is too early to say anything because of the cost factor involved and how receptive people are of the first corridor. A major lacuna that can put a question mark on high-speed corridors is that it remains a dedicated corridor and cannot be amalgamated with the existing Indian Railways network for interoperability. This stand-alone aspect makes it a very costly proposition that can force the Railways to have a rethink on it.
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Infographic: Ganesh Gamare; illustration: Gajanan Nirphale
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Mehul Thakkar, Nirupam Banerjee, Naveeta Singh, Manan Kumar, and Keyur Dhandeo
(Compiled by DNA-Research N Archives)