View: Why anti-bullet train arguments are idiotic

By Anuvab Pal

I cannot understand the arguments for not having a bullet train. I cannot understand why getting somewhere faster is a bad thing. I don’t really see the joy of a crumbling rain infrastructure that takes people five hours to get from Bombay to Pune when a pigeon can fly faster.

The arguments for any development project in India always seems to be that the money can be better used somewhere else. When someone funds a quick train, millions on social media say: why not different trains? Why not feed the poor? Why not every other thing that isn’t this train? To which the government says: um, why not this train? At least it is something.

Logically, distance suggests a Mumbai-Delhi train ride can be done in 8 hours, and it is criminal, if not mad — and we’ve all got used to being ‘mad’ with our transportation — that there isn’t a train between Mumbai and Bengaluru, two massive business hubs, that takes less than 24 hours. A distance one can drive in 12 hours and perhaps walk — briskly? — in 15.

Could you perhaps use the money for a faster train to clothe and feed people and do all the other suggestions the governments’ detractors suggest? Probably. Will that happen? Definitely not. In its absence, would having a fast train be a good thing?

I’d say when your choices are between zero and something, something is a better bet. Development comes with hard choices and someone has to make them. China has used rail powerfully to connect the country. Now, is it really beneficial to the people? Nobody knows. It is China. When the Chinese government wants to do something, they just do it, regardless of what social media thinks. Mainly because they’ve, um, pretty much banned social media.

Using trains to connect the country faster is not an offence. It is, perhaps, a reasonably good idea, given that we are landlocked and relatively manageably small. The US, for example, is also landlocked. But the airline lobby (all private sector) is so powerful that it makes sure only air travel exists as the viable option, even for tiny distances like San Francisco to Los Angeles. This helps in keeping trains inefficient and slow, and customers having to do with such small seats and such bad service on monopoly airlines that you’d be led to believe you hadn’t caught a flight but committed a crime. On one recent US flight, someone was charged for a glass of water.

Anti-bullet train-arguers have said, ‘Let’s discuss all the other ways in which this money can be used.’ Which is basically the same thing as saying, ‘If this project is stopped, absolutely nothing else will happen with the cash, the end result being, no bullet train, and no other thing either.’

Anyone in any meeting knows when something is proposed, the best way to kill it forever is for the deciding boss to say, ‘Let’s see what else we can do with this money.’ To explain, the island nation of Malta, once a British colony and now part of the EU, was heavily bombed by the Germans during World War 2. They had an opera house that was destroyed in the 1940s. For many years, every proposal to build something to restore it was met with, ‘What a waste of money when we can be doing x, y, z!’ Nothing stood there for all these years except a bomb crater.

That was until in 2015, when Malta’s mayor got fed up and said, ‘Everyone here has an opinion, and if I listen to it, nothing will happen. I’m building a new opera house. I don’t care who thinks what. At least we’ll have a new opera house, which is better than nothing.’

The bullet train arguments make me wonder if we are Maltese. In any development project, sure, one can say, ‘Why spend here, why not there?’ Isn’t that the job of the elected government to prioritise? And one imagines there would be as many supporters of faster rail travel as anti-Modi bullet train jokes on social media.

Sure, every bullet train money can be used in other things. That’s an unwinnable argument like saying: by helping Syrian refugees, you are ignoring Myanmar refugees. Or, because I am at a stand-up show tonight, I didn’t climb Mount Everest — ignoring the fact that the latter isn’t even possible, given my delightful physique. (Incidentally, that was a joke.) There will always be people one cannot do everything for. And that’s just life. Does that mean one shouldn’t do anything till each and everything can be done? That’s idiotic.