In another blow to infrastructure of Mumbai, the alliance government of Maharashtra might stop the Hyperloop project, which aimed to reduce the travel time between Mumbai and Pune to just 35 minutes. Speaking in a typical leftist politician tone, the finance minister of state, Ajit Pawar, said: “Hyperloops have never been constructed anywhere in the world until now, so let this be tried somewhere else before us. Once it is successful, then we can think of it.”
The alliance government first stopped the payments of Bullet train project, and now it is eyeing to do the same with hyperloop. “It’s just that we do not have the capacity to experiment with hyperloop technology,” said Ajit Pawar.
The $10 billion hyperloop project aims to reduce travel time between Mumbai and Pune from four hours to less than 35 minutes, covering the distance of 150 km between the two cities.
Hyperloop is high-speed travel in tubes where a pod-like vehicle travels through a tube at a speed which is more than the usual airline speed. Its first open-source design was released by a joint team of Tesla and SpaceX. The speed of this mode of transport is 1,200 km per hour and the technology is expected to revolutionize transportation. Almost 7.5 crore passengers travel between Mumbai and Pune every year as of now, this number is expected to skyrocket to 13 crores by 2026 when the project is expected to get completed.
Previously, when the hyperloop project was being inaugurated, the then chief minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis, had said, “Maharashtra will create the first hyperloop transportation system in the world and a global hyperloop supply chain starting from Pune. Maharashtra and India are at the forefront of hyperloop infrastructure building now and this is a moment of pride for our people.”
This shows the critical difference between the functioning of the BJP government and that of other parties. On one hand, BJP aims to make India the country with cutting edge infrastructure equipped with modern technology, while other parties still living with third world county mindset, where every technology comes to India after that is tried and tested in other countries.
This mindset of the Congress and other Centre-left parties has contributed to the poverty of the country. The countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia, which came to existence in their modern form in the 1940s and 50s, just like India, have become middle-income countries as they opened up to the world. While India, with the availability of almost all necessary resources, has remained one of the poorest countries; given the mindset of Congress and other left parties which ruled the country for almost seven decades.
The hyperloop technology is expected to revolutionize the transportation system in the upcoming decades. It is as fast as air travel if not more and very environment-friendly. The project will lead to a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to about 1.5 Lakh tonne annually. The Mumbai-Pune route is one of the busiest routes in the country, where road and air traffic is very high despite good connectivity.
But the Povertarianism mindset of the alliance government is keeping the country away from taking Great leap forward in the critical transportation system, which could be future of the travelling.
