Title - RAIL NEWS CENTER: HSRC to execute India's first bullet train project between Mumbai and Ahmedabad

NEW DELHI: High Speed Rail Corporation of India(HSRC), a company that was incorporated last month, will speed up the process of building India's first high speed rail network between Mumbai to Ahmedabad. This will reduce the current travel time between the two financial hubs from current eight hours to about two hours.

The HSRC, which has been created as a subsidiary of Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL), will formally be launched by railway minister Mukul Roy in September, according to an official connected to the development.

The Vision 2020 document presented to Parliament by then railway minister Mamata Banerjee in 2009, first talked about implementation of high speed rail corridors with services at 250 to 350 km per hour.

"We have just begun the process. But yes, it will be implemented in a public private partnership mode", Satish Agnihotri, managing director of RVNL said. According to the written reply to a question in Lok Sabha on Thursday, the railway ministry informed that likely private investment in the high speed corridor between Mumbai and Admedabad will be to the tune of Rs 20,000 crore. The government is also expecting soft loan from multilateral agencies and government institutions of Japan.

The newly incorporated HSRC will first concentrate on Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor before venturing out to other corridors such as Delhi-Chandigarh-Amritsar, Delhi-Agra-Lucknow-Varanasi-Patna, Howrah-Haldia, Hyderabad-Chennai and Chennai-Bangalore-Coimbatore-Ernakulam-Thiruvananthapuram.

The company will prepare project related studies, preparation of technical standards, providing support to government in finalizing financial and implementation models.

Significantly, the first high speed train Shinkansen, popularly called bullet train, was introduced between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka in 1964. The original speed of the bullet train was 240 km per hour, which was later enhanced to 300 km per hour. The other such high speed trains are TGV of France, AVE of Spain and Chinese Railways.

In India, Shatabdi Express is the fastest train so far which zips at a maximum of 150 km per hour only in the section between Delhi and Agra. In most other stretches its speed limit is 130 km per hour.