There's a 15 year moratorium on the loan repayment and I have not seen any documents to suggest that this is to be linked with inflation. That's not to say, it will not have an impact since, it will be affected by the INR-JPY exchange rate.
I believe none of us disagree that IR need some serious overhaul in terms of tracks, signalling, rolling stock and operations. For too long IR has been milked and abused at the whims and fancies of the
banu/neta mafia and people have suffered as a reason.
The question is whether the HSR project is coming at the cost of these critical requirements?
Well there's no place better to examine this than the railway budget is it?
Let us have a look at the railway budget of 2015-2016 and see how much money has been allocated to take on the challenges being faced by the railways.
Highlights of the Indian Railways budget 2015-2016
http://pib.nic.in/archieve/railbudget/rbudget2015/rh2015.pdf
For better clarity, I will list them out in the descending order of amount allocated
Proposed Investment plan (2015-2019)
Item Amount (Rs in crore)
1. Network Decongestion (including DFC, Electrification, Doubling 199320
including electrification and traffic facilities
2. Network Expansion (including electrification) 193000
3. Safety (Track renewal, bridge works, ROB, RUB and Signalling 127000
Telecom
4. Rolling Stock (Locomotives, coaches, wagons– production & 102000
maintenance)
5. Station redevelopment and logistic parks 100000
6. High Speed Rail & Elevated corridor 65000
7. National Projects (North Eastern & Kashmir connectivity projects) 39000
8. Passenger amenities 12500
9. Others 13200
Total 856020
So out of the total allocations of 856020 crore, HSR & elevated corridor have been allocated 65000 crore
This is a grand total of
7.6% of the total allocations!!!
Now let us group the allocations into two fundamental task groups
1. Overhauling and expanding the railway infrastructure,
2. Improving passenger experience.
1. Improving Railway infrastructure
Network Decongestion (199320 crore) and Network expansion (193000 crore) alone have been allocated nearly 3 times the HSR allocation EACH!! Together the allocation for these two tasks is
~40% of the railway budget and if you include
Safety (127000 crore), the share goes up to
61% of the Railway allocations. Kashmir and Northeast projects have been allocated separate funds of 39000 crore.
Together, these four tasks of improving and expanding the existing Railway infrastructure have been allocated
558320 crores, which is
65% of the Railway allocations.
2. Improving passenger experience
The second task group of passenger comfort is addressed by allocations for
Rolling Stock (102000 crore), Station redevelopment (100000 crore) and Passenger amenities (12500 crore), which together add up to
214500 crore that is
25% of the allocation.
Together, these two account for
90% of all the allocations!!
So clearly the focus is on improving IA first and foremost.
There goes the myth that HSR will come at the cost of general improvements to IR.