Things have gone drastically south with the Bullet Train mega project, which was announced with great fanfare a decade ago.
The new date for inauguration of this project (practically a white elephant for India) is 2033, a full eleven years after the initial plan of 2022. The time and cost overrun is beyond imaginable.
Further, the two Shinkansen train sets which were to be made available by Japan will no longer be coming. India will have to manufacture its own sets for the Ahmedabad to Mumbai route. As an interim measure, it has been announced that Vande Bharat trains will run on these tracks. The VB is broad-gauge specific, while the Bullet Train runs on standard gauge tracks, thus the normal VB rolling stock will be useless and special train sets will have to be manufactured.
By the time the project is commissioned, the interest moratorium period on the loan extended by Japan would have ended, so India will be saddled with a considerable interest burden besides accelerated repayment of the initial capital. The annual outgo will be Rs 6,800 crores while the maximum revenue generation estimated
from the Bullet Train operations is Rs 3,800 crores. This is a best-case scenario. It is quite obvious that the BT has been a 'dead in the water' endeavour. Also, the rupee would have majorly depreciated in the remaining eight years to commercial operations, which would bloat the dollar-denominated loan.
This was clearly a vanity project for Modi, launched simply to burnish his ‘development’ credentials without it being thought through. Nowhere in the world are Bullet Train operations profitable, except on some routes in China. But the other countries where these trains run like Japan, France, Germany, Austria etc., have super robust economies. They can absorb losses indefinitely as long as their citizens enjoy the benefits of high-speed mobility and the resultant positive impact on economic activity. This mega project will simply bleed the Indian economy to death. Modi will be eagerly looking forward to inaugurating the Bullet Train, so hopefully the project will meet its 2033 deadline... or maybe not.
