Forget Indian Railways' Bullet train, govt planning another high-speed rail project

Problems of Indian Railways' Bullet train project between Mumbai-Ahmedabad pertaining to land acquisition are over, says Centre. With that solved, government is embarking on another high-speed rail project.  Yes, that means this particular region is not the only one going to benefit from an extremely fast running train service as other regions too will get one of their own. 

“The environmental and social impact studies are either complete or are near completion. I personally don’t see any stress in getting the land,” Union railway minister Piyush Goyal said on the sidelines of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) annual meeting.

However, Goyal did not name the corridors or when the project would be kick-started. Notably, the financing for new high speed rail project may come from AIIB.
 
The minister also declared that the government was not facing any problems from the landowners for any infrastructure projects across the country.

“The government wasn’t facing any opposition from landowners neither for the bullet train nor for any other infrastructure projects that are being implemented across the country as the compensation has been increased to fivefold for the high-speed rail project and fourfold for other infrastructure projects,” he said.

Annual funding for the first high-speed rail project has been provided by JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency). It has now agreed to increase the annual funding from $3 billion to $5 billion.

The representatives of multilateral bank, who had interest in being part of upcoming bullet train projects, participated in discussion held by the Union Railway minister during the three-day AIIB meeting.

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The central government lined up nine other projects for finance from the Beijing-headquartered bank after picking up 28% of AIIB’s total lending exposure of $1.4 billion for seven projects.

The concept of bank first came in 2014 and the amount was approved since 2015 after the multilateral development bank was in place.

The annual meeting was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.