CASE STUDY 2: BULLET TRAINS
Another glamour project of the present government is the introduction of Bullet Trains in India. Again, on the face of it, it appears unobjectionable. Bullet Trains are symbols of a country’s development, only developed countries have them and the few developing countries that have them, such as China and Turkey, thus have bragging rights and claims to developed country status. What is wrong if India also has these ultra-modern, prestigious trains and thereby provide the travelling public a world-class travel experience which will also save huge amounts of time for passengers, especially business people, thus giving a boost to productivity and the economy as a whole. However, a closer examination shows that it involves enormous expenditure, will serve only a tiny proportion of rail passengers and, to boot, will have economically non-viable high fares, almost certainly calling for subsidies for a better-off class of passengers. And this will be at the cost of better amenities and services for the overwhelming bulk of ordinary lower-income and middle-class rail passengers, who will continue to be provided slow and poor services on ageing infrastructure and overcrowded railway lines, even while the government never gets tired of bemoaning a lack of funds for improving infrastructure and the subsidies being extended to this class of passengers. Once again, a lopsided developmental model following the neoliberal paradigm is being put forward which benefits a very small section, less than 10%, of those at the top of the pyramid while ignoring the interests of over 90% of the people. Let us examine the Bullet Trains programme more closely, in the light of well-documented international experience. Proposed High Speed Rail Projects in India A favourite idea of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also highlighted in the BJP Manifesto, is to introduce High Speed Rail (HSR) in India, more popularly known as "Bullet Trains" after the original name (dangan resha) of the world’s first HSR service, the Japanese Shinkansen. The longer-term plan of the present government is not just one or two small stretches as has been contemplated off and on over the years, but to build HSR corridors over a vast 6000km long "diamond quadrilateral" going around the country, somewhat like the "golden quadrilateral" of highways initiated by the Vajpayee-led NDA government in the late nineties. This would be a huge and dramatic infrastructure project that would loudly project India’s national pride and announce the country’s march towards the front ranks of advanced economies. In the shorter term, a pilot project in the MumbaiAhmedabad sector has been approved and is at an advanced stage of planning, while a second, longer Delhi-Varanasi corridor linking the national capital to the Prime Minister’s parliamentary constituency is slated to be taken up next, with a possible extension up to Kolkata. Many transportation experts, financial institutions, sections of the financial press and even renowned HSR engineering companies have expressed their scepticism about these projects based on assessments of costs, ridership, possible ticket prices, viability and societal benefits.
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First we should be clear about the technical definition of Bullet Trains or High Speed Rail (HSR). Although HSR is defined in multiple ways in different countries, the most widely accepted term defines HSR as embracing three specific aspects namely Speed (maximum speed of at least 250 kmph, special track and special operating conditions especially locomotives and carriages designed integrally with infrastructure for complete compatibility, safety and high-quality performance. In India, therefore, HSR would involve completely new tracks and related infrastructure including stations, protective structures on both sides of the new tracks to prevent human or animal intrusions, new locomotives and carriages, and new operational systems. A "diamond quadrilateral" of new HSR track would involve huge quantity of land acquisition, massive investments, and would necessitate high frequency of trains, high ridership and high tariffs for ensuring financial viability. Precisely because these conditions are very difficult to meet, many countries including developed nations have not been able to afford or set up High Speed Rail. If India is adopting HSR because developed countries have it, the international experience itself provides enough evidence as to why HSR is a bad choice for India, and will always be a luxury project serving the rich that India can ill afford. International experience The best-known HSR networks, and most cited as examples for other countries to follow, are the pioneering Japanese shinkansen, the well-established European national and transnational networks, and recently the Chinese HSR which has dramatically expanded to cover almost 20,000km over a decade and a half! Japan’s bullet train service was introduced in the densely populated industrial and employment corridor between Tokyo and Osaka where more than 45 million people lived. The distance of 515km is today covered in less than 3 hours with just 2 stops and a top speed of 320 kmph. The service runs more than 13 trains per hour with 16 bogies, a higher passenger load and frequency than anywhere else in the world. The Tokyo-Osaka line alone carries around 150 million passengers per year, and is eminently suitable for Japan’s densely populated, high-income industrialized society with most population centres along thin strip Experience in Europe and elsewhere have broadly borne out these basic characteristics of viability, namely medium distances, highdensity business routes, fares competitive with air fares, relatively high spending capacity, and high frequency services. The French TGV (for grand vitesse or high speed) was started in the Paris-Lyon stretch, again one of the most crowded intercity lines in France. The 415 km route is uncomfortably long for road travel and too short for affordable air travel. The route has relatively low running costs due to its reliance mainly on nuclear power, as was the case in Japan till the Fukushima disaster. The French service, like most HSR services worldwide, has been heavily subsidized in one way or another, with passengers especially initially lured by promotional tariffs equivalent to normal trains. Not all countries would or can adopt such a course. The UK’s diesel-electric HSR has remained confined to tiny stretches, since privatization even of the conventional rail network has pushed fares high and passenger load factors to new lows. Spain’s HSR network, slated to be the largest in Europe by 2030, is based on the idea that 90 percent of the country’s population would be living within 50km of an HSR station. The country’s current economic problems, high unemployment and falling incomes are, however, holding the programme back. In South Korea, with both highways and conventional railway lines showing serious congestion in the 1970s, HSR services were launched in 2004 on the busy and densely populated Seoul-Busan corridor between the country’s two largest cities representing over 75 percent of the population and around 70 percent of both freight and passenger traffic. The US started a single route HSR service early, along with the UK, but further progress has stalled since then in a country dominated by road and air travel, and with public investment in infrastructure declining sharply over the past several decades due to neo-liberal policies. Currently, a huge debate is underway on the desirability of HSR services in two high population-density, high-employment corridors of Los Angeles-San Francisco and the Philadelphia-Boston-New YorkWashington DC corridor with several stops and offshoots on the way. If these two economic clusters were countries, they would each rank in the top 10 nations of the world! The California proposal won public approval in 2008 with 52% votes but with serious opposition from conservatives opposed to the large estimated public expenditure of USD 58 billion (Rs.360,000 crores). Of course, all these norms appear to collapse in the case of China which seems to defy most generalized developmental or economic assumptions. China’s first operational line opened in 2003, but poor performance led China to change direction and import technologies from France, Germany and Japan with transfer of technology agreements. At an astonishing pace, by 2011 China had the world’s longest HSR network covering around 8,400km and beating Japan’s record passenger load! But standard seats on the 2,200km route from Beijing to Shenzhen in the dynamic south-eastern coastal export and manufacturing zone cost around US$ 144 (Rs.8,500), close to air fares, and business class seats are about 3 times more! Fares have had to be reduced many times, even to below cost prices, to meet purchasing power of the people. Still, working class migrants going on seasonal visits to their home towns apparently prefer cheaper ordinary trains even if they take much longer. China’s HSR has come at an extremely high cost of approximately US$ 20 billion (Rs.1,14,700 crores) for a 1,000km route. China’s Railways are reported to be struggling with a US$ 318 billion debt (Rs.18,80,134 crores) and an annual loss of around US$ 1.46 billion. No other country, certainly not India, has such deep pockets
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