India lacks bullet train. The current prime minister Narendra Modi made a promise to bring bullet trains to India when his party came into the power for the first time. “Bullen train” has been a trending topic in India for a long time, but now it seems that this topic is going to wipe off because of the approval of a new project – The Hyperloop Project.
The Hyperloop Project is a transportation system for people to travel at a speed reaching up to 600 miles/hour. The state government of Maharashtra has approved Virgin Hyperloop One – DP World Consortium as Original Project Proponent (OPP).
The project has been acknowledged as a public infrastructure project. This means that this project will be treated in the same way as many other infrastructure projects are like roads, highways, buildings, etc.
The aim of this project is to cut down the travel time which takes when traveling from Mumbai to Pune and vice versa. The distance between these two cities is about 150 KM. It is expected that the Hyperloop Project will cut the current travel time of about 3.5+ hours when using roadways to just 30 minutes.
The only part left to kick-start this project is the role of the local government to start providing construction tenders by mid-August. The tenders will be provided by the Pune Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (PMRDA) if all the process goes well.
The Hyperloop Project will be implemented in two phases. The first phase includes the building a test track on an 11.4km corridor from Gahunje to Ozarde and the next phase is to build the complete 117.15km track.
The DP World will take care of the investment part which is estimated at 500 million dollars. And the state government will handle the land deals and logistics required under this project. According to the officials, this project will bring hundreds of thousands of new high-tech jobs in India.
