The Japanese government, may, in all probability, agree to lend $8.1 billion for the first bullet train corridor (called High Speed Rail or HSR) between Ahmedabad and Mumbai during Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to India in December 2015.
Narendra Modi had promised during the campaign for Lok Sabha elections that his government would develop Diamond Quadrilateral of HSR between four metropolitan cities and its diagonals very similar to the Golden Quadrilateral and North South – East West road corridors. Apart from the questions that have been asked about the need and viability of HSR, the oft-repeated question is why Ahmedabad-Mumbai route has been chosen for the first HSR corridor. Some quarters have been claiming that as Prime Minister Modi is from Gujarat, the Ahmedabad-Mumbai route has been selected for the first HSR corridor. The claim is of course not true. Why?
The first reference on HSR was in the 2007-08 railway budget presented by then railway minister Lalu Prasad. The budget mentioned that four HSR corridors, one each in Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern regions of the country would be developed in due course of time. As a follow-up, the high density corridors of Ahmedabad – Mumbai-Pune, Chennai–Bengaluru-Coimbatore- Ernakulam, Delhi–Chandigarh-Amritsar, Chennai–Vijayawada– Hyderabad, Howrah-Haldia and Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi–Patna were identified for pre-feasibility studies in the Vision 2020 document of Ministry of Railways in 2009 when Mamata Banerjee was at the helm.
In 2012, the government established the High Speed Rail Corporation as a subsidiary of Rail Vikas Nigam Limited. The feasibility reports submitted by various agencies between 2010 and 2013 clearly indicated that Ahmedabad – Mumbai route is the most potential corridor for HSR among all the corridors. The stretch of Mumbai–Pune was dropped in the 2013-14 railway budget as the cost of construction of HSR between Mumbai and Pune was found to be relatively high as Mumbai-Pune is the ghat section. As a sequel, the then UPA government initiated a detailed feasibility study of the Ahmedabad–Mumbai corridor in January, 2014 and asked the Japan International Cooperative Agency (JICA) team to submit its report by May 2015.
In the meanwhile, with the ascension of Modi at the Centre, the HSR projects got an unprecedented fillip. The Modi government pursued vigorously with Japan, France, China and Germany for cooperation in terms of investment, technology transfer, Make in India with reference to various options of HSR. Feasibility studies were awarded for the new corridors of Mumbai–Delhi, Mumbai–Kolkata, Delhi–Kolkata, Chennai–Delhi and Delhi–Amritsar to various agencies in 2015. The feasibility study of JICA for Ahmedabad–Mumbai HSR corridor clearly indicated that in 2023-24, the first year of operation, the project would get about 40,000 passengers every day.
Key parameters
The study conducted for a Doctoral thesis on HSR in IIM-Ahmedabad indicated that by 2025-26, the Ahmedabad – Mumbai HSR corridor would get more than one lakh passengers every day and the project would be financially viable. It is the potential of Ahmedabad–Mumbai corridor that pushed the policy makers irrespective of their political affiliation to choose Ahmedabad–Mumbai as the first corridor for implanting HSR. Why it is so?
For a corridor to qualify for HSR, the key parameters are base traffic, per capita GDP/income, distance of the corridor, and current and future economic growth, as per international standard. As on today, more than four lakh people travel every day between Ahmedabad and Mumbai or parts thereof by rail, road and air. It would increase to about 10 lakh in 2025-26, the time by which HSR is ready for operation. No other corridor has such high base passenger traffic.
Since HSR offers very high capacity, to utilise this huge capacity, there should be enough cities en route at right distances with high population densities. The Ahmedabad–Mumbai corridor accommodates Mumbai, a metropolitan city and two big cities of Ahmedabad and Surat (fourth fastest growing city in the world) in addition to Vadodara, a city of moderate size and many smaller towns.
The per capita GDP or per capita income of Maharashtra and Gujarat are relatively higher than most of the bigger states and Ahmedabad–Mumbai corridor is one of the highly industrialised corridors in India. The optimal distance for an HSR which operates at the maximum speed of about 300 kmph is between 250 km and 600 km in order to ensure that HSR provides daily travel facility between cities rather than the current pattern of overnight travel.
Whenever countries had gone for HSR, they choose the high traffic route for their first HSR corridor. For instance, Japan chose its high density corridor between Tokyo and Osaka via Yokahama, Shizuaka, Hamamastu, Nagoya and Kyota and this the most successful HSR corridor in the world now both in terms of serving the largest number of passengers and financial success. France has also chosen the high density traffic route of Paris–Lyon as its first HSR corridor. In fact, both Japan and France have used the windfall profit that they have generated from the operation of their respective first HSR corridor to develop and sustain other HSR corridors which are not financially sustainable.
The first HSR project has to be in the high density route as its success is very critical for its entry as a viable mode of travel. The government has done a right thing by choosing Ahmedabad–Mumbai as its first HSR corridor. Most of the other corridors that have been identified by the Government of India would also become viable in the years to come. If the momentum for developing HSR is continued for 20 more years, India may have about 10,000 km of HSR network traversing across various states and cities by 2035.
(The writer is a Doctorate in Public Systems from IIM-Ahmedabad)