PM’s Antoinette moment

ON the day PM Narendra Modi counselled the sceptics of the bullet train project to take to bullock carts, a major tragedy was averted in Rajasthan after a diesel engine hit a truck and caught fire. The accident sums up the opposition of the naysayers to the bullet train: many British era bridges are yet to be replaced; the sorry tale of our tracks gets highlighted every monsoon with a series of derailments. The Modi government’s inability to attend to the existing infrastructure and process was laid bare when a public cry after several accidents forced him to shift Suresh Prabhu from the Railway Ministry.

Those opposing the bullet train project are no Luddites. Their ire over Modi repeatedly underscoring the project must be contextualised against the sorry state of the existing railway infrastructure spanning 62,000 route km as against a mere 700 plus km for the bullet train. The PM is correct in charging the Congress government with inaction. What he doesn’t say is Japan’s pile of investible cash is so humungous that its banks charge a negative interest rate on deposits. Besides, but for raw material, most of the technologies must be sourced from Japan. In inter-state relations, there is no space for empathy. The UPA government had demurred because it wanted to extract something tangible from Japan in return for becoming a willing recipient for its surplus money and technology.   

It is no one’s case that India should turn its face from the bullet train. The country needs many such high speed as well as semi-high speed rail corridors. But the game behind hoisting the project on a pedestal is the election season in Gujarat. This is why the PM overlooked his homily to the Railway Ministry not to take up a project till land acquisition is nearly complete. In this case, Modi conducted an ostentatious road show in Ahmedabad with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe in tow for a ground-breaking ceremony when not an inch of land had been purchased. The country needs to modernise in leaps and bounds. But a self-serving project must not become the leitmotif of progress.