Mumbai’s hankering to compete with Shanghai as a global financial hub is no secret. It is reported that Maharashtra has invited expression of interest in building magnetic levitation trains in the Mumbai urban area.
And whereas Shanghai only has a single 30-km line from the airport to Pudong, Maharashtra intends to build no fewer than six Maglev lines of between 20 and 50 kilometres each.
For those not familiar with the concept, Magnetic Levitation trains do not touch the rails but rise cusion of magnetic repulsion a few inches above them at speeds of up to 500km an hour. The project is so futuristic that it could have been dismissed as a pipe dream – the Congress’ answer to the inter-basin river linking project that was dreamed up by the Vajpayee government six years ago – had it not revealed a dangerous loss of all sense of proportion in ther Sachivalaya, and since the same party rules at the Centre, in New Delhi as well.
Had the officials who dreamed up the project been less obsessed with outdoing the Chinese and made even a cursory study of the Shanghai project they would have seen that it is an utter and complete financial disaster.
Maharashtra’s estimates of the cost of the project run from Rs 30,000 crore to a paltry Rs 8,000 crore. But the the Shanghai Maglev cost $1.3 billion, at a time when the dollar was on a par with the Euro. By this yardstick, the 200-odd km of the six proposed routes in Maharashtra will cost Rs 45,000 crores.
Second, the Shanghai Maglev was never meant to be a commercial proposition. It was the product of one man’s megalomania, and sanctioned without even a cursory bow towards financial viability. That man was Chen Liangyu, a close associate of former President Jiang Zemin and, till last year, the all-powerful party secretary of Shanghai. Chen is reported to have remarked, “I have a dream.” But unlike Martin Luther King, his dream was not about equality but its opposite; he had set out to make Shanghai the premier city of Asia, if not the world.
The deadline he had set himself was the 2010 World Expo, which is to be held in Shanghai. To meet it he embarked upon a series of grandiose projects with a royal disregard for costs and returns. The “hai” in Shanghai, he used to lament, meant the ocean, but Shanghai had no beach. So the government shipped in 128,000 tonnes of sand from southern China to build a 10 km long beach in the suburbs!
Not only did Chen Liangyu re-start construction of the world’s tallest building, which had been stopped after the Asian crisis, but he commissioned a $290 million, world class tennis complex and a $300 million formula one race track, both consciously designed to be among the most modern and the best in the world. It did not matter to him that few Chinese owned cars, and fewer still played tennis.
So grandiose was the planning that the race track may have ended by costing $1.24 billion.
The Maglev was part of his dream. After it was built analysts found that its payback period (the time it would recoup its investment), was more than 160 years! Undeterred by this, Chen Laiangyu announced that he intended to extend the Maglev train to Hangzhou at an estimated cost of $5 billion. Even in China, this proved to be the last straw. Public protests became so intense and continuous that Chen’s government could not convene without massive security deployments worthy of a visit by a foreign head of state.
In September last year President Hu Jintao dismissed Chen Liangyu from the position of Party Secretary on charges of corruption and suspended him from membership of the central Committee. In May 2007, the Maglev extension was cancelled, and in July he was stripped of his membership of the communist party in preparation for a possible trial.
The mere announcement of such a project raises a host of questions: How did Maharashtra conceive of such a fantastically expensive project? Has it obtained the Planning Commission’s consent for it? Did it consult the Central government before sending out feelers to Indian and foreign companies? How does it intend to finance such an expensive project? And if Chen Liangyu failed to sell this project to the people in authoritarian China how does the Congress expect to do so in democratic India?
As for the Centre, it no longer seems to care that this, and all the investment intended for the new industrial corridors that it has blessed, will go to the already industrialised parts of the country. The per capita income of Gujarat is more than three times that of Bihar, east UP , Bengal outside Calcutta, Assam, and Orissa, and more than twice that of central India. Just how long does the Centre think India will remain united if the schism it is allowing continues to widen?
