[Source/Author: Guancha Observer Columnist Dong Xiao]
The first high-speed rail project in India, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail Project, has made slow progress over the past ten years. According to Japanese media citing sources, after multiple delays and budget overruns, the project is once again facing a change in train models - it is proposed to replace the originally planned E5 series Shinkansen with the next-generation E10 series train, which Japan has yet to put into use. This model is expected to be deployed in Japan only in 2030, and this adjustment may lead to obstacles in technology transfer and further increase in costs.
Due to the long delay, many people may have little impression of India's purchase of high-speed rail from Japan. At that time, the Japanese side went to great lengths to secure this large order.
Entering the 21st century, the demand for economic development and people's travel needs made India urgently want to develop its own high-speed railways; naturally, there was also the desire of politicians to seek higher power. At this time, India was ambitious and intended to become a global superpower, and establishing a nationwide high-speed rail network was exactly a "good start" that matched this ambition.
We won't go into detail about India's railway system here; in short, it can be described as dirty, chaotic, poor, and crowded, with safety not guaranteed. Some might say that if India's railways are poorly managed, they could focus on aviation instead; the United States doesn't have high-speed rail but relies on air transport to meet public travel needs, so high-speed rail isn't an essential requirement for national development.
January 17, 2022, Mumbai Railway Station, a passenger looks out of the window of a long-distance train. Agence France-Presse.
Regarding this point, Tretesh Shrivastava, a senior research fellow at New Delhi Global Policy Watch and an expert on railways and transportation infrastructure, explained that although India's aviation market has been expanding in recent years, ordinary Indians still heavily rely on railways, which dominate the travel choices of most social classes. This makes the Indian government place great importance on developing and expanding railway infrastructure.
Of course, determination is good, but the problem lies in the gap between "thinking" and "getting," which requires "doing." Such a massive infrastructure project, closely related to the well-being of thousands of people, determines that it is not just an economic or technical issue; from its inception, it is a political issue.
In 2014, Indian Prime Minister Modi launched the "Make in India" plan, aiming to promote domestic production and transform India into a "global design and manufacturing hub." This laid an unshakable基调 for India's subsequent procurement of foreign high-speed rail - we Indians indeed want to buy high-speed rail, but we don't just want the whole train; we also want local factories and technology transfer.
At that time, faced with such a vast market in India, enterprises from various countries rushed to enter the scene. Some spent huge sums on market research, while others sought help from high-ranking government officials to speak on their behalf during diplomatic efforts. The number of railway construction projects worldwide each year is limited, and securing one means profit. However, if we ask who was the most proactive, it was none other than the Japanese government.
Talking about high-speed rail, Japan's Shinkansen is a brand name known far and wide internationally, enjoying a good reputation and even becoming a promotional card for Japan's highly advanced technology. Despite the good reputation, Shinkansen hasn't performed well in earning foreign currency. According to reports by Japanese media in 2018, the export of Shinkansen to Taiwan in 2007 was the only successful case. Therefore, it's no surprise that Japan exerted extra effort when India invited bids for high-speed rail construction around 2015.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pose in front of a high-speed rail model. Kyodo News.
A year later, in December 2015, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited India, and during his summit talks with Modi, they reached an agreement for India to introduce Japan's Shinkansen. According to the agreement at that time, the project was supposed to start construction in 2017 and open in 2023. Based on Japan's initial estimate, the total cost of the new Shinkansen project, including civil engineering, trains, and signaling systems, was approximately 1.8 trillion yen.
The result of prioritizing politics was that, to quickly push Japanese companies to explore the Indian market, the Japanese government initiated a new round of financing totaling 1.5 trillion yen at the end of 2015. According to Japanese media reports, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation would provide financing for part of the funds required for power plant and factory construction, encouraging Japanese enterprises to participate in India's major engineering projects. Combined with the previous yen loans for high-speed rail construction, Japan's economic ties with India were continuously strengthening.
Besides being generous in economics, Japan was also willing to transfer the construction of carriages to India. Previously, when exporting Shinkansen to Taiwan, due to concerns about technology leakage, the Japanese companies involved abandoned the idea of direct local production in Taiwan.
The order name for India's first high-speed rail construction plan is impressive. To successfully win the bid, Hitachi decided in 2018 to cooperate with BHEL, a state-owned enterprise in India. Hitachi's plan was to initially export some complete vehicles from Japan, during which time they would discuss setting up a joint venture factory in India, gradually transferring production processes to India, and completing the transfer of vehicle assembly processes by 2023. If everything went smoothly, they would then slowly transfer the production of core components like body shells and underframes to India.
In 2014, Modi shouted about building India's high-speed rail and promoting "Make in India"; in 2015, Abe and Modi signed an agreement to build Japan's high-speed rail; by 2018, Japanese companies started preparing to win bids and form joint ventures. According to your previous plans, construction should have started in 2017.
Originally, India hoped that the country's first high-speed rail line (from Mumbai to Ahmedabad) would be completed and operational by August 15, 2022, as it was the 75th anniversary of India's independence. Unfortunately, the completion date of this project has been postponed from 2023 to 2027, and further delayed to 2031. For Modi, both India's high-speed rail and "Make in India" are never livelihood projects but political ones. He underestimated the difficulty of building high-speed rail, thinking that with Japan's technology and money, it would be easy to accomplish.
The biggest headache was the land acquisition issue. As is well known, Modi, nicknamed the "Butcher of Gujarat," enjoys extremely high personal prestige in Gujarat. However, looking across India, not everyone accepts this. According to CNN reports, as of September 2021, the land acquisition work for this route from Mumbai to Ahmedabad has progressed slowly. In Gujarat, the land acquisition has been very effective, reaching 97%, but in Maharashtra, it has only reached 30%.
India's high-speed rail plan diagram. Nikkei Chinese Network.
The main reason why land acquisition has been slow is that farmers are unwilling to give up their land; of course, whether these farmers are spontaneously resistant or incited by influential figures in the locality remains uncertain. To address this, the Indian side had no choice but to reduce the amount of land occupied, deciding to operate more than 90% of this high-speed rail line on elevated bridges, which directly increased the cost by $1.3 billion. In addition, they designed a 21-kilometer underground tunnel north of Mumbai and a 7-kilometer underwater tunnel.
Another factor causing delays in the schedule is that India's high-speed rail trains cannot run on existing tracks because India's railways use a wider gauge of 1676 millimeters, which is wider than the universal standard of 1435 millimeters. This means that if India adopts the Shinkansen, it must be equipped with international standard gauge and a dedicated railway network, and adapting to and solving new technologies and production lines require a lot of time.
To make matters worse, the financial situation of Indian Railways, held and operated by the Ministry of Railways under the Indian government, has deteriorated continuously over the past six years. The growth rate of company costs has surged to more than twice that of revenue growth. Employee numbers have been declining, but wages have more than doubled. Meanwhile, Indian Railways is actively recruiting, planning to hire 140,000 people in June 2022. Suresh Prabhu, then Minister of Railways, publicly complained: "We expected it to make money like a commercial enterprise, but it ended up serving like a welfare organization."
The slow land acquisition and skyrocketing costs have led to repeated delays in Japan's completion of the high-speed rail project in India. The outbreak of the pandemic further exacerbated this issue. With no solution in sight, the Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese media reported in 2022 that the Japanese government was prepared to extend an additional loan of 100 billion yen to India, with an annual interest rate of 0.1%. This move was met with strong criticism from Japanese netizens, who angrily referred to the project as a "hot potato" snatched from China, and now Japan finds itself mired in the "Indian high-speed rail quagmire."
Ten years ago, when Japan took on India's high-speed rail project, the entire nation was encouraged, seemingly dispelling the earlier gloom caused by losing the Indonesian high-speed rail project to China in fierce competition. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun wrote a special article titled "Why Did Japan Lose to China in the Indonesian High-Speed Rail Project?" After a long discussion, they concluded that the reasons for the bidding failure were "Indonesia's regime change bringing in a pro-China leader, Joko Widodo," and "China offering Indonesia conditions it couldn't refuse, even at the cost of its own interests."
The most interesting part of this article was where the two authors, Manabu Shimada and Sadaharu Watanabe, acidly wrote at the end: "No one can guarantee that China's plan will proceed as scheduled. In 2004, China obtained orders for railway construction projects in the Philippines, but the project did not progress, and the plan has been frozen. At that time, the Philippine government turned to Japan for assistance."
However, history has come full circle. In 2015, one leader chose Japan's Shinkansen, and another chose China's high-speed rail. Both leaders came from South Asian countries and planned to build high-speed railways. A decade later, Indonesia's Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail has already opened and is in operation. By October 17, 2024, it will have been fully operational for one year, with a cumulative passenger count of 5.79 million. In contrast, India has postponed the completion date of the project to 2030, and full operation will not happen until after 2033.
Lastly, let's add one more thing: this proposal to switch from E5 to E10 for India's high-speed rail was initiated by the Japanese themselves. Therefore, some people believe that this is actually Japan's cunning strategy, using the guise of upgrading the project to persuade India to continue funding and raise funds for the development of new trains. But considering that India has earned the nickname "graveyard of multinational corporations" through its own efforts, whether this is truly a scheme and who is scheming whom remains uncertain.
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