 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us the Raghunandan and we will discuss the much triumphalist version of the railways which is now being presented i.e. the bullet train. Modi and Abbey Shinzo have signed various agreements and this is being presented as a great new leap in Indian railways. Raghun, can you tell us a little bit about the project in terms of what it means for the Indian railways and how much of an impact is it going to make? This project is just one corridor of a high-speed rail between Mumbai and Andabad, which is a fairly high-density corridor, stretches over about 520 kilometers or so. It has 12 stations in between. Bulk of the track is elevated, more than 80% is elevated track. A small portion is underground, in fact under the sea in Thane, about 12 kilometers range. You've got a very similar amount which is on the surface, the rest is elevated. And you have 12 stations as I said, 7 of them in Gujarat and 5 inside Maharashtra. And if the train stops at 4 stations in between, the current 8 hours train time between Mumbai and Andabad can be cut down to 2 hours. But if it stops at all the 12 stations, this will go up to 2 hours and 40 minutes or 2 hours and 50 minutes. That's the broad picture. But if you look at it in comparison with the rest of the railway, clearly this doesn't even figure in the first decimal place in terms of length of track. Because the Indian Railways has something like about close to 65,000 kilometers of routes. And some of them are of course double track, so it means about 120,000 kilometers of track. And this is just 500 one way, so it's 1000 if you consider both directions of it. So it's a drop in the ocean as far as the Indian Railways as a whole is concerned. There are plans for maybe extending high speed rails to another 6 corridors for which some feasibility reports have been conducted. But most of these are much longer corridors such as Delhi, Mumbai, Mumbai, Chennai, which are over 1000 kilometers each. Cost of this has been argued as such that it is going to mean if we have to recover it from the ticket sales, then it's going to mean really a very expensive ticket. So what are the likely economics of this in terms of raising the money just for what we have spent from the passengers? This is I believe is the most tricky part of this project. The total outlay on this is at current costs about 1 lakh and a few thousand crores, 100 and something thousand crores out of which the Japanese are giving about 80 plus thousand crores to India on a virtually throwaway interest rate. It's 0.1% interest stretching over 50 years. So the repayment part is not going to be very difficult but it still has to be repaid over time. Now the cost recovery is tricky because they say this is going to do 70 trips a day. That's 35 trips each way. Each train will carry 500 plus passengers. The detailed project report that's been prepared for this says the ticket prices are likely to be around 4000 rupees plus which at current prices is roughly one and a half times airfares at the cheapest airfare. More expensive airfare will come close to this. It's more than the first class air conditioned rail fare between the two cities. The density part of it is okay but the viability to my mind is highly doubtful because international experience suggests that while high speed rail breaks even at somewhere around 450 to 500 kilometer routes longer than that tend not to be economically viable. So the distance wise it's okay. Relatively the passenger density might be okay. The problem will come down to the fares because if the fares are going to be as high as this then over the longer period I don't see that there will be such a flood of passengers coming on this because airfares will be competitive and you have now good motor connections between automobile connections between Ahmedabad and Mumbai so those will be competitive as well. To me viability is the big question and given the Indian experience of similar projects in the past two concerns are one is the total investment is very likely to go up as you would know most large big ticket projects like this you're projecting costs today but over the next five years or so when the project has to be rolled out costs are likely to go up. That's one and secondly the tariffs and if they remain this high I think there will be big question marks over the viability of this. Now the criticism has been that it's okay there's an 18,000 plus odd crore loan from Japan but it will actually go back to them in terms of equipment sales. So it's really a deferred purchase of Japanese equipment that is really happening but apart from that the other argument has been that considering what capital investment is required for Indian railways and we are seeing accidents happen every day now involving even the Rajthani that is what this government should have focused on upgrading the tracks which is one of the major reasons for the accidents looking at what the signaling equipment all of those capital investments which are not really happening and this endangers the railway traffic in rest of the country and the second part of it is that if you want to push up the speeds then a secular improvement of speeds across board with up gradation of the current tracks going up to say 180, 200 kilometers would have led to a far greater efficiency in the Indian railways of passenger traffic than just focusing on one shall be say high visibility project which ends up becoming more as a what shall we say a glamour project that really looking at the railways is the whole thing. I fully agree with that. Right now on a few trial tracks there is an up gradation of the super fast Rajdhanis in particular and the plan is to bring them up to a medium speed rail which would be 240 kilometers maximum with an average speed of 170, 180 in that range which itself if you ask me given the kind of distances that we have in this country a Delhi Mumbai train which currently takes 17 hours would come down to something like maybe 10 hours or so. That's a very significant improvement is also likely to then attract fair amount of custom back from air to trains it's also I think very important for us you spoke of safety and you spoke of improving tracks there's also a very bad need today for doubling of tracks the doubling of track length has taken place only along major trunk routes but most other routes in this country just have a single track going up or down which then results in huge delays trains waiting for the up train to go past and so on which is why you get the notorious delays that Indian passengers trains are notorious for 85% of Indian railway passengers today travel by sleeper class or less and all these improvements that I'm talking about on Rajdhani, Shatabdi and now the bullet train are for the air conditioned class of passengers which is 10% or so and with bullet train over a 500 kilometer stretch alone is going to be in the second decimal place of total passenger traffic that the Indian railways carries to me therefore this is a highly elite oriented project catering to a very small number of people and if this is going to be the yardstick by which we judge whether the Indian railways has come of age or not then clearly it's very misplaced priorities because you're not addressing the needs of 90% of passengers of the Indian railways this is really a vanity project absolutely completely but leaving the vanity part of it out one could argue well it will have cascading effect and so on but this whole concept of elevated track means you're going to build parallel tracks you need acquisitions of land and then building the elevated tracks all of it is going to be rather difficult given the kind of resistance we've been seeing in the country for just with you know electricity lines, high transmission, high voltage transmission and so on absolutely and they have I think underestimated the amount of resistance they are likely to get what they seem to be calculating is because they are elevated tracks like most of the metro projects that are going on around the country it will be less disruptive than a track on the surface which would have probably resulted in even more displacement of lands and calling for land acquisition but more than that to me this issue of viability is going to be the critical one like you said even if we leave the vanity quotient of this project behind the big question is is this going to be a viable project or not other than Turkey which has got a similarly short high speed rail track coming up to Istanbul from Ankara and going under the sea crossing the Bosporus from the Asian side to Europe it's a very high density line and it's not just a high density line it caters mostly to fairly high income tourist traffic which applies on that route mostly to and from Europe and Istanbul itself gets close to 50 million tourists a year the most international experience suggests that unless you have a high income travelling population it's very difficult to make bullet trains succeed and it's telling that no other developing country other than China which I think in today's reality can hardly be called a developing country no other developing country has a high speed rail project many countries have tried, have prepared feasibility reports, have had discussions but then have backed off and lately Taiwan has an ongoing high speed rail projects which they have rolled back because they are finding it not to be viable and Taiwan is a fairly high income country certainly compared to India there's claims now that if India has this bullet train this will be a demonstration of how India has developed and has reached the position of a set of leading countries of the world viewers should know that even the United States today does not have high speed rail tracks and they have struggled now for over 10 years debating about whether it's going to be viable or not this seems to be more a Bodhi, shall we say, Varity project and wanting India to catapult into a quote-unquote new kind of countries which have this kind of technology and ambition without taking into account what is going to happen to the rest of the rail absolutely and this pandering to the aspirational desires of a small section of the middle class in this country while the rest of the country still has to suffer from extremely poor rail services which today carry only about 15% of the passenger traffic compared to 85% it used to carry at the time of independence it's a situation which is gone in reverse because of the neglect of the railways and an unfortunate promotion of highways which in these days of climate change I think should certainly have been in the opposite direction if not then then at least now we should be thinking along those lines thank you very much Raghu for being with us we will continue to examine this kind of issues more often as we go along I think climate change, public transport, private transport are issues that we don't have to discuss this is all the time we have today for discussions on the bullet train do keep watching us and do click and subscribe to our YouTube channel and visit our sites