Your dream of travelling at super-fast speeds on Indian Railways may have to wait. The railway ministry is likely to put the ambitious Rs 1-lakh crore bullet train project on the backburner owing to a possible cash crunch. Bullet trains, to run at 200 km an hour, were planned along four routes.
Railway minister Lalu Prasad had announced his ministry?s intention to start bullet trains, in his Budget this year. Feasibility studies on the traffic potential of various routes are in the pipeline. Initial plans suggested that, if all went well, the first bullet train would have rolled out by mid-2008.
Railway officials, however, told FE the project?comprising four routes costing about Rs 25,000 crore each?would be reviewed at the end of the fiscal and taken up only if the railways had surplus cash. ?The time doesn?t seem right at present for the project, but we will carry it out later,? a Rail Bhavan official said.
The Rs 1-lakh crore investment in the bullet train project is over a third of the entire Rs 2.5-lakh crore allocation for the railways under the 11th Plan. The railways has already lined up a number of capacity expansion projects over the next five years, including an ambitious dedicated freight corridor (costing Rs 30,000 crore) and the uni-gauge project (Rs 17,000 crore) that aims at having a uniform gauge system throughout the country?s rail network. Further, the plan to modernise the four metro stations involve an investment of Rs 16,000 crore.
In such a situation, railway officials pointed out that the high-speed corridor project would have to be postponed.