Modi, Abe to kick-start India's first bullet train project

What an incomparable spectacular reception accorded to the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife in the Indian Gujarat State capital Ahmedabad an hour ago which included a receiving ceremony at the airport where the Japanese PM was received by Indian PM Narendra Modi personally, followed by a unique eight kms. road show attended by both the leaders and Mrs. Abe. They then visited the place where Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi spent most of his time - Sabarmati Ashram (resort). A unique welcome and a unique show indeed for a friendship that is also proving to be unique!

"Ahmedabad -- the capital city of Modi's home state".. This is incorrect.

"Gandhinagar" is the capital cityof Modi's home state "Gujarat".

Hope when Trump visits Japan, he will see bullet trains and Shinkansen in Japan. In USA, there are chu chu trains somewhere and that's it.

That's great, lets just hope that the fares will be in line with the average workers wages in India. If not then this is nothing more than a vanity project for the Indian rich and powerful.

I guess for the good but given the current state of indian railways I hope this doesn't turn out to ne a white elephant.  plus if anything like travelling on domestic flights in India then this will be little like the shinkansen here.

But passengers have to often endure chronic delays in journeys on the British-era network, where only a few trains hit 100 miles per hour, and which has been hit by series of deadly crashes in past years.

There are not much chronic delays and there is hardly any trace of British-era network, and most high speed trains make 100mph. There are hardly any deadly crashes, but deadly derailments do happen sometimes and virtually all of them are acts of sabotage nay terrorism.

This is great news although part of me thinks that nothing is more 'un-Indian' than a bullet train in India. It once took me 45h to get to Kolkata from Trivandrum (south-west). Train was already 5h late at Trivandrum, 17h on arrival.

This is a good deal actually, India is a country that would benefit ridiculously from a national high speed rail network and Japan getting in early gives it hundreds of future opportunities

Japan will provide 85 percent of the total project cost of $19 billion in soft loans.

So if the project is a success, it will be a triumph of socialism. Private capital is playing an increasingly smaller role in the 21st century.