New Delhi: Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Saturday said the upcoming bullet train corridor of Mumbai and Ahmedabad will allow passengers to ‘have breakfast in Surat, go and complete your work in Mumbai, and come back with your family in the night’, NDTV reported.
Ashwini Vaishnaw said the ambitious project will help integrate economies.
‘The bullet train project has to be seen from the perspective of integrating economies. In the first corridor that Indian railways is doing, Mumbai, Thane, Vapi, Baroda, Surat, Anand and Ahmedabad - all these economies will become one single economy. So you can have breakfast in Surat, go and complete your work in Mumbai, and come back with your family in the night,’ the minister was quoted as saying.
When asked whether bullet trains would be cheaper than flights, the minister said bullet train projects have taken 90 per cent of transportation share in most of the places ‘where bullet train projects have gone’.
Started in November 2021, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor is progressing steadily having built the first kilometre of the viaduct in six months and 50 th finished by April 2023.
The minister further said that bridges have been built over 8 rivers for the corridor and the project is to cost around Rs 1.08 lakh crore with Centre committing ₹ 10,000 crore, while Gujarat and Maharashtra pooling in Rs 5,000 crore each.
The remainder of the cost will be secured via a loan from Japan - at a minimal 0.1 per cent interest rate, according to NDTV.