Mumbai to Pune in 28 minutes, Bengaluru to Chennai 78 minutes, Hyderabad to Bengaluru 2 hours and 8 minutes, Mumbai to Ahmedabad 1 hour and 57 minutes, and Delhi to Lucknow in 2 hours.
These are the kind of travel times between major Indian cities that the Narendra Modi government is envisaging through high-speed rail (HSR) connectivity that would require an estimated Rs 16 lakh crore to implement.
Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, speaking to the gathering of CEOs from across sectors at the CII Annual Business Summit 2026 in New Delhi earlier this week, shared some of the projected numbers. “Nobody will fly. These sectors would be out for airlines. If you want to invest in an airline, mark it down,” he declared. To some, Vaishnaw may have sounded like a politician, but his arguments reflected decades of global experience with HSR systems.
“Bengaluru and Chennai would become twin cities, combined into one,” Vaishnaw said, adding that the journey from Delhi to Varanasi would be done in 3 hours and 50 minutes. For anyone who has seen what happened to airlines in Japan, France, Spain, Italy and China once HSR was introduced on key corridors in the past half century, the projections would seem a no-brainer.
The same relationship holds true from country to country and decade to decade, to the point that transport economics treats it as a near-physical constant. In the 2024 global study of 145 city pairs on six continents, done by transport research website Hot Rails, no mature rail product with travel times under three hours has ever captured less than half the market share. For journeys within two hours, HSR holds up to 90 per cent of the market share; below 90 minutes, the airlines just exit.
Japan has proved this. On the Tokyo-Osaka route, where the Shinkansen HSR takes 2.5 hours, almost the entire market share is held by rail. Technically, other modes of transport remain operational but have little use.
France realised the same as Paris did away with domestic short-haul flights where a train alternative existed to reach destinations within 2.5 hours. This meant flights to Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux being nixed.
In Spain’s primary AVE (Alta Velocidad Espaola) corridor of Madrid-Barcelona, rail’s share of the market rose from 12 per cent to 48 per cent after the AVE line opened, and climbed to 73 per cent once more operators—AVLO, OUIGO and Iryo—were allowed to run.
Infrastructure did half the work and competition the rest. In Italy, on the Milan-Rome corridor, HSR caused the rail travel share to increase from 36 per cent to 58 per cent. It then rose to 80 per cent once competition from other transport modes vanished.
However, studies have repeatedly underlined that building HSR in vacuum leaves these benefits unrealised. For instance, any train that brings passengers to a station bereft of last-mile connectivity (integrated bus terminal or metro rail) would be at a disadvantage.
That is something India’s HSR planners would have to bear in mind. The focus here has shifted from engineering to urban geography. “If you are living in Surat, Vadodara, Anand or Vapi, you can travel anywhere within your day’s work. Go to the city, work and come back to have dinner with your family,” said Vaishnaw. In other words, the upcoming Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train corridor will have to aspire to create ‘one city, one economy, one region’.
HSR stations that develop as multi-modal hubs from the start have dramatic economic impacts. Japan’s Shinkansen stations are layered transit networks. In Spain, all AVE stations are connected to metro and commuter rail systems. On the other hand, the UK could not connect HS1 and HS2 at a single hub in London—this is often cited in planning schools as siloed thinking.
Vaishnaw said most of the Rs 16 lakh crore investment in HSR would go to local vendors and engineering firms. India already exports propulsion systems (complex electrical machinery that handles 900-ampere currents) to Germany, France, Italy and Mexico. The National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd and railways ministry will construct the tracks and stations. Whether these stations can become economic engines for the cities will depend on whether urban development authorities, municipal corporations and state governments have a common vision and are on the same page.
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