A fast train to development

Riding a bullet train is an awesome experience. At over 300 km per hour, you gently glide beside extensive farms and countryside, unaware of the speed at which the technology marvel is accelerating. Like many things in their life, the bullet train was another technology masterpiece that has been assimilated, adapted and executed by an army of mandarins, under the benign gaze of politicians, and has now become part of the economic lore of China's urban cities.

In less than 15 years, the Chinese have built the longest high-speed rail network on earth, of approximately 9,676 km, of which 3,515 km can top speeds of 300 km. The BBC reported that by 2012, China would have more high-speed rail networks than the rest of the globe put together. And to top it all, China has been converting its decades-old railway lines to accommodate high-speed trains: something which India could easily emulate.

In return, the high-speed rail network has triggered a fresh bout of growth into China's flagging economy — absorbing huge investments, generating a constant demand for resources and raw materials, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs, and kindling economic activity by bringing goods, services and people into greater proximity.

INDIA'S RAIL CORRIDORS

India's achievements on high-speed rail are near zero. Despite having one of the largest networks on earth at 1,14,500 km, most of the lines require serious maintenance and upgradation. A large portion of it is in the double-line mode. Of India's total route length of 64,215 km, less than a third is electrified. While the route kilometres of the Indian rail network have increased by just approximately 18 per cent in the last 60 years, it has grown threefold in China. Though some resolute policy measures had put Indian railways on course, things seem to be unravelling again. Instead of fuelling economic growth, Indian railways seem to be re-emerging as a moribund pool into which huge investments disappear.

But there is still hope. In its efforts to speed up its transport infrastructure, Kerala plans to set up a high-speed rail corridor between Thiruvananthapuram and Mangalore, a distance of 580 km, reducing the travelling time to around three hours. Though the costs, estimated at Rs 1.18 lakh crore might seem astronomical, the economic and environmental benefits would still work in its favour.

Behind the bamboo curtain, bullet trains are merrily chugging along, seamlessly connecting thriving cities like the capital Beijing with the industrial city of Shanghai — a distance of 1318 km, covered in less than five hours. While the full economic logic behind the Chinese bullet trains will take several more years to manifest, it is the philosophy behind it that is even more compelling — the crisp, coherent and concise environmental logic.

While combating the developed countries and holding forth eloquently on the rights of developing countries at successive international environmental forums, at home, the Chinese have been doing their homework, and practising it too. And the bullet train is a classic example. The prime reason for the execution of the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train project was not only the growing demand for faster transport between two of China's biggest cities, but also the blinding smoke and choking pollution that road vehicles were increasingly spewing out into the environment.

POLLUTION CONTROL

It's not that the high-speed trains have been able to mitigate vehicular air pollution overnight. The winter morning air in Beijing is still choked with pollutants, as a haze hangs across the city. But slowly, the problem is being addressed.

The high-speed rail network, said Mr Zhou Xinjin, an economist working with the Transportation and Economics Institute at the Chinese Academy of Rail Sciences, has not only helped to mitigate China's vehicular pollution, but is also proving to be the platform for China's transition into a low-carbon economy.

Global economic growth has been driven by high-energy consuming industries, with conspicuous emission-driven technologies which battered the delicate ecological balance during the last century. This was the case with the transport sector. Now, the time has come to set the house in order, and plan for the next level of growth — a low-carbon economy with low energy consumption, low pollution and low effluent discharge. The low-carbon economy would follow the agriculture and industrial civilisations, Mr Xinjin said. And one major hub of the low-carbon economy would be low-carbon transportation.

And the near-zero-emission bullet train is perceived as a vehicle that could be the stepping stone into the next level of growth. Running on electricity, it leaves behind no trail of smoke, fumes and hardly any dust. “The proportion of high-speed railway in China kept growing and effectively put forward energy conservation and emission reduction,” Mr Xinjin said.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Buttressing the economic and environmental rationale, Japanese research has proved that energy consumption per person per km was more than five times for cars and planes, as against high speed trains (5.6 : 5.3 : 1).

In the case of mileage per person, it was found that planes consumed the highest unit of fuel, followed by cars and high speed trains (1 : 0.62 : 0.26). Taking into account various polluting gases and suspended particulate matter, railways in general, and high-speed trains in particular, were found to be far less polluting than cars and planes.

Further, scientists have highlighted a list of economic and environmental advantages of high-speed trains.

On a very comfortable high-speed train journey from Hong Kong to China, which provided everything from bathroom slippers to a hot water kettle, to individual TV sets and piped music, a senior Chinese mandarin said that the idea of the bullet train was conceived as thousands of cars took to the highways, as business and transport needs between Beijing and Shanghai soared.

Hence, the introduction of the bullet train not only reduced the growing threat of traffic snarls on Beijing-Shanghai highways, where thousands cars jostled for space spewing out pollutants into the atmosphere, but also reduced travel time and made it accessible to the middle-class, compared to the higher costs of air travel. The bullet train has been a success for both economics and ecology in China — making it the first and only country to have a commercial train service on overhauled conventional rail lines that can reach 350 km per hour, the Chinese mandarin said.

It is time that India emulated the Chinese success story to enter into the next phase — low-carbon economic growth.

Although not at the grandiose scales as in China, India too has been making modest plans. In the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, India made plans to construct a new Dedicated Freight Corridor covering approximately 2762 route km along two routes — the Eastern corridor linking Ludhiana with Daukuni, and the Western corridor from JNPT to Tughlakabad / Dadri.

But it is time that India began thinking more ambitiously: beyond the structured conventional rail system and for a low-carbon future.

It might cost billions of dollars in investment. But as Mr Xinjin has pointed out, so would the cost of building airports and buying aeroplanes — or for that matter, the huge investment that would be required in building India's ambitious North-South and East-West road corridor.

And India won't be planning for its future transportation needs alone: but also for a greener and less polluting, low-carbon environment.

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