Ashwini Vaishnaw: Bullet train first target is August 2026

Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union minister for railways, communications and IT, wears multiple hats. In an exclusive interview with Times Special for our launch day, Vaishnaw discusses the Narendra Modi government’s governance focus on ensuring that there is efficient use of funds and the long-term goals are not sacrificed for short-term handouts. Also Listen: How India's space dream took off from Thumba He also says that the 5G coverage will be significantly ramped up by Diwali, with contracts for modernisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports likely to be finalised around the end of the financial year. Excerpts:Times Special: The last few months have seen a contest between two duelling ideologies, one with politics of handouts being justified as pro-people and the other, as the PM put it, as a long-term vision which is not dependent on short-term handouts. How do you see these contrasting approaches towards politics and the political economy?Ashwini Vaishnaw: Today, every citizen wants to focus on delivery, hassle-free delivery, corruption-free and transparent delivery. There are multiple things that have created this mindset. The good governance model that has been created by PM Narendra Modi in his long public service, which started in Gujarat, and is now being implemented all over the country. The model is keeping the common citizen at the centre and building schemes around the common citizen. This is how the mindset of people has changed and is getting reflected in multiple ways in terms of support and trust in the policies. The support and trust is reflected in the vote share that BJP is getting in state after state. Even when there are some electoral losses, the vote share has increased.How do you address the criticism that it leaves out people on the margins and therefore you need to do something proactively for this segment?Absolutely not. The focus is on the people at the margins and the under-privileged. Take any example, be it Ujjwala, which focused on mothers and sisters who had to deal with those chulhaas, or toilets at home.Are you scaling up the direct benefit transfer scheme, which seems to have plugged leakages?At one point of time then PM Rajiv Gandhi ji said that if you send Re 1 from Delhi, 85 paise goes away by corruption and only 15 paise reaches the grassroots. Today, when PM Modi presses a button, Re 1 is sent from Delhi and Re 1 is received by the person in the village. This has been possible because a good governance framework was created through 45-crore Jan Dhan accounts, then came UPI along with Aadhaar seeding of beneficiaries. A very robust infrastructure has been created to transfer money instantly. By now Rs 26 lakh crore has been transferred to people’s account with savings of Rs 2.2 lakh crore in terms of leakages.There is still a lure of subsidies, and the old pension scheme became an issue in Himachal Pradesh. How do you balance the electoral and governance challenges?If the conviction is very clear, that India has to be a developed country by 2047, the path has to be such that we may have to make sacrifices today but we know that taking this path will help us reach a good level of prosperity, which is the path to be taken. The PM’s conviction is very clear – you can’t take shortcuts, you have to work for the long term and one has to make sacrifices and leave aside so many temptations of short-term gains.So, are things like free power or old pension schemes short-term political tactics?People have already rejected this in large parts of the country. Example after example where people have not gone after free power or allurements. There are so many places where political parties that were offering such promises have seen their candidates lose deposits.Does that mean that you will ignore such allurements as you enter a crucial political phase of elections?Modiji’s focus on good governance and garib kalyan [welfare of the poor] is a very holistic focus. It takes into account the reality of the grassroots and what it will take to change their lifestyle in a sustained manner.What is the update on the rollout of 5G?It was launched in October after auctions were completed in a timebound manner. A good rollout of our scale takes around 36 months. We are targeting to complete a large part of this in 24 months. By 2023 Diwali, we should see a very significant coverage of 5G. We now have around 25,000 towers upgraded with around 150 models of handsets that are 5G enabled. The handset manufacturers have ramped up 5G manufacturing and close to one-fourth of the handsets are 5G enabled. The cost of these handsets has come down to Rs 10,000-15,000. We will see a huge uptick in the level of coverage from April onwards. The first phase is to set up the core network, software systems.You released the draft telecom bill and the one on data privacy. What is the status of the consultations and when will you move them in Parliament?These are two foundational bills and we will also have the Digital India Bill, which is in advanced level of drafting. The first round of consultations in case of the telecom bill are over and we are tweaking a lot of things based on consultations. We are targeting the data bill in the budget session and telecom bill in the monsoon session.How is the progress on the bullet-train project? Have things picked up and when will it be ready?It is going on at a very good pace. In the first year of construction, we completed aroud 113 km, now it is 12-13 km every month. After the Shinde government took over, within a few weeks all the permissions were given. Tenders have been invited. On the Gujarat side, works started earlier, the progress is very good.One of the flagship schemes of railways is the Vande Bharat trains. How do you look at the roll out of these trains? Every state is demanding these trains. How are you dealing with that demand and supply?A total of 500 Vande Bharat trains have been sanctioned in the Budget. We are taking into account that 500 such trains will be manufactured in the next few years. The design for the train was completed in August. It was a very complex design where the ride quality had to be significantly better. The noise level had to be very low. The first train was tested at 180 kmph. The first commercial services started on September 30 from Gandhinagar to Mumbai. Now the supply chain of the train is getting settled. We are producing two to two-and-a-half trains every month. By March-April, this will increase to five to six trains a month.You recently said that transformation in the country will happen when the railway transforms. What are the big transformations that will happen in the railways in the next 25 years?The PM sincerely believes that the country’s transformation will happen only by transforming railways and there are multiple reasons for it. We are a country of 130-crore people. Railways move 800-crore people every year and 1,400 million tonnes (MTs) of cargo. To be able to carry so many people and so much cargo efficiently, we need to transform railways. In the transformation programme, there are fundamentally three elements. First, passenger experience, which means stations have to be redone and redeveloped fully and trains have to be on new technology. Safety features such as Kavach have to be fully installed. Second is the focus on cargo, which means new design of wagons, new locomotives and high horsepower locomotives. Third is the whole focus on systems, manpower, training, skill development, IT systems and AI-based route planning and routing. We are working on every aspect and have set a target of transporting cargo of current 1,400 MTs to 3,000 MTs by 2030. This will require a lot of investment in the areas which are bottlenecks, developing new products for small cargo, integrating with the postal department making sure that the first mile and last mile links are done. Lot more initiatives are being taken.When will we see the New Delhi and CST stations modernisation projects getting completed? Is there a launch date you have for the bullet train?Bids for the three large station redevelopment projects, which were approved by the cabinet recently, were floated within five-six days after the approval. Pre-bid meetings have happened. We are expecting to get the bids in early January and decide by February and start work. Pre-construction work has already begun. In the case of the bullet train, the current target for the first section to be inaugurated, to be started for trial runs from Surat to Bilimora, is August of 2026.Audio production: Anil Chauhan