Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious, Rs one lakh crore Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train project is moving at a snail’s pace, reports Bloomberg. The Mumbai-Ahmedabad 508-km corridor, being executed by the National High Speed Rail Corporation, will require around 1,400 hectares of land in Gujarat and Maharashtra, 1,120 hectares of which is privately owned.
It has been a year since the project has been put into motion but thus far, of the 1,400 hectares of land required, only 0.9 hectares have been acquired. As per the original schedule, the bullet train, to be built with Japan’s ‘Shinkansen’ technology, was to begin operations in 2022, but given the slow pace of land acquisition, it is going to be an uphill task to meet this deadline. Farmers in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra are opposed to the process of land acquisition, deeply unhappy over the compensation they will receive in exchange.
Over 1,000 farmers from Gujarat had filed affidavits in the Gujarat High Court in September, against the land acquisition process initiated by the state government. The court has sought the government’s stand on the plea on November 22. About 110km of the train corridor passes through Palghar in Maharashtra, where too there has been stiff resistance from farmers.
However, the NHSRCL has said it is committed to looking after the interests of the project-affected farmers; further, it said, there are no funding gaps, despite the delay in land acquisition. According to a company spokesman, the date of operation for the project will be in August 2022, before its official completion target by 2023.
This is another instance of farmer protests stalling a project. A decade ago, violent protests by farmers resulted in Tata Motors Ltd abandoning a factory in West Bengal and opting for a new site in western Gujarat to manufacture the world’s cheapest car, the Nano. The proposed construction of an oil refinery in Ratnagiri too has been facing issues related to land acquisition, adds Bloomberg.
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