Bullet train: ‘Come December, Japanese PM too will learn what jumla is’

If the bullet train ever becomes a reality, passengers who board from Ahmedabad will have to grow wings half-way through to land in Mumbai. For, while some land may have been acquired for this ambitious project in Ahmedabad, the process has not even begun in Mumbai. Whenever it does, no one has any idea where they might get the land in a city of people tightly packed like sardines in a tin.

Most of the green spaces now available in Mumbai are already under attack by the Mumbai Metropolitan Development Authority for building the metro. In any case, those spaces are not in alignment with the possible route of the bullet train project. And tribals and fishermen in Palghar in Thane district are already up in arms at even the suggestion that they may have to give up land for the bullet train to come firing in.

An earlier announcement by former Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for a trans-harbour line between Thane and Navi Mumbai has been allowed to quietly get buried after the realisation that that this would have to cut across existing railway lines and both the financial and human cost of the project would be enormous.

The project was first envisaged by the UPA government in 2007-08 as India's first bullet train between Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad. After a pre-feasibility study, the government dropped the Pune leg and settled on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad leg in 2013. However, then the condition was that there should be immediate transfer of technology to India but now the Japanese are under no obligation to do so.

Moreover, Narendra Modi's much touted claim that Japan will provide India with the funds at 0.01 per cent rate of interest is no great shakes either. For, India is actually doing Japan's deflationary economy a favour by borrowing funds at a rate that Japan provides to all borrowers. And, as Tehseen Poonawalla, Congress spokesperson, says, Modi is wrong again that it is an accident-proof technology. "Which it is not. Even China which has taken the technology from Japan has faced many accidents. But why China alone? Japan, too, has not been foolproof," he said.

So if the bullet train cannot really prevent derailment, it is much more advisable, then, to improve our existing railway tracks and accident records. The day the much-hyped project was officially launched, the Rajdhani from Jammu derailed just outside Delhi. Slightly over a week before that, half the tracks in Mumbai were sitting under three feet of water and all three rail lines in Mumbai - the Central, Western and Harbour lines - had come to a complete halt.

Poonawalla also points to another reality. Much like an airport, a bullet train too requires other commuting facilities like metro and rail connectivity. "In more than a decade, Ahmedabad has not been able to lift its metro rail off the ground. How will the passengers come in and go out?"

The irony is Mumbai does have some metro routes but perhaps not in alignment with the bullet train's route. Ahmedabad may have the land but nothing more.

"It is just an election gimmick ahead of the Gujarat polls,” says Hemant Fitter, former spokesperson of Keshubhai Patel's Gujarat Parivartan Party.

He added: "They were not able to transform Kashi into Kyoto, as claimed by Modi before 2014 and the UP polls. They brushed jhuggi-jhopdis aside in Ahmedabad for Abe's visit. Mark my words - the hype is only until December 2017. After the Gujarat elections, the Japanese PM too will learn the meaning of jumlebaaji!"