Rail budget 2014: Here are the 9 high speed routes promised by Gowda

Railway minister Sadananda Gowda promised among other things, the introduction of nine high speed routes in the country.

“Railways will spend Rs 100 crore for high speed trains between metros”, Gowda said. The pilot of the high speed bullet train will be a route from Mumabi to Ahmedabad.

Here are the other routes:

* Delhi-Agra,

* Delhi-Chandigarh, * Nagpur-Bilaspur, * Goa-Mumbai, * Chennai-Hyderabad, * Delhi-Kanpur and Delhi-Pathankot * Mysore-Bangalore-Chennai, * Nagpur-Secundrabad

“We will have a diamond quadrilateral network of high speed trains,” Gowda said, adding that the project would require a sum of Rs 9 lakh crore for funding the project.

Notably, there are no high speed train networks immediately planned for the east of the country. That means nothing for Kolkata which has traditionally enjoyed a high level of patronage from the railway budget, thanks to a succession of TMC rail ministers during the UPA regime.

Is this directly correlated to the fact that the BJP did not perform well at all in the east of the country? The party lost out badly to regional powerhouses like the TMC in West Bengal and Naveen Patnaik’s BJD in Odisha. Either way, this is unlikely to go down well with the people in the east!