According to information given by Railway Minister Piyush Goyal in a written reply to a query in Lok Sabha recently, the Modi government in the month of August 2019 has approved two projects for raising of speed to 160 km per hour on existing New Delhi-Howrah (including Kanpur-Lucknow) route and New Delhi-Mumbai (including Vadodara-Ahmedabad) route.
According to Goyal, at present, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (HSR) corridor is the only high-speed rail corridor project in India, which is sanctioned and the same is under execution with the financial and technical cooperation from the Japanese government. The Railway Ministry has also decided to undertake Detailed Project Report (DPR) for six more HSR corridors, the work of which has been entrusted to National High-Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL).
The six corridors are- 865 Km long Delhi – Noida – Agra – Kanpur – Lucknow – Varanasi corridor, 886 Km long Delhi – Jaipur – Udaipur – Ahmedabad corridor, 753 Km long Mumbai – Nasik – Nagpur corridor, 711 Km long Mumbai – Pune – Hyderabad corridor, 435 Km long Chennai – Bangalore – Mysore corridor, and the 459 Km long Delhi – Chandigarh – Ludhiana – Jalandhar – Amritsar corridor
The 508 km long Ahmedabad-Mumbai high-speed train corridor will be India’s first Bullet train, based on Japanese E5 Shinkansen technology. In September 2017, PM Modi and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe jointly laid the project’s foundation stone. The HSR corridor is expected to cover the distance between Ahmedabad and Mumbai in just two hours.