High speed rail will be based on Indian technology and Indian coaches: Nirmala Sitharaman

The government ‘was in favor of and is still in favor of always a strong rupee’ and is not indifferent to the rupee-dollar exchange rate, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her first post-budget interview with Network18 Group Editor-in-Chief Rahul Joshi.

• India to build seven high-speed rail corridors using indigenous technology
• Corridors will reduce travel time, enhance connectivity, and boost regional growth.
• Proposed 2,052-km freight corridor from Dankuni to Surat for cargo movement

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Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday said in her first post-Budget interview with Network18 Editor-in-Chief Rahul Joshi that India’s upcoming high-speed rail network will be built on Indian technology, with trains running on Indian-made coaches.

“In order to promote an environmentally-sustainable passenger system, we will develop seven high-speed rail corridors between cities as growth connectors,” Sitharaman said while presenting the Budget on Sunday.

The Finance Minister proposed high-speed rail links between Mumbai–Pune, Pune–Hyderabad, Hyderabad–Bengaluru, Hyderabad–Chennai, Chennai–Bengaluru, Delhi–Varanasi and Varanasi–Siliguri. According to the government, these corridors are expected to sharply cut travel time, enable seamless multimodal connectivity and act as engines of regional economic growth.

In South India, the Chennai–Bengaluru–Hyderabad network will form a high-speed triangle connecting major IT and economic hubs. Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said travel time between Chennai and Bengaluru will be reduced to about 1 hour 13 minutes, Bengaluru–Hyderabad to around 2 hours, and Chennai–Hyderabad to about 2 hours 55 minutes. He added that the corridor would act as a growth multiplier for Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry.

In western India, the Mumbai–Pune high-speed corridor is expected to cut travel time to around 48 minutes, effectively integrating the two cities. Connectivity from Pune to Hyderabad in under two hours will further create a continuous high-speed spine across regions.

In the north and east, the Delhi–Varanasi corridor will enable travel in about 3 hours 50 minutes, while the Varanasi–Siliguri route, passing via Patna, will reduce travel time to under three hours. The government expects this corridor to create a new economic belt across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

Vaishnaw said the seven corridors will span nearly 4,000 km and attract investments of around Rs 16 lakh crore, positioning railways as a central pillar of India’s future mobility.

Alongside passenger rail, the Budget also proposes a new 2,052-km Dedicated Freight Corridor from Dankuni in West Bengal to Surat in Gujarat, passing through Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

“To promote environmentally-sustainable movement of cargo, I propose to establish a new dedicated freight corridor connecting Dankuni in the east to Surat in the west,” Sitharaman said.

The corridor will integrate with the existing Western Dedicated Freight Corridor and ease congestion, as the current Eastern and Western DFCs are operating near saturation, handling around 400 freight trains daily.

Currently, construction is underway on the Ahmedabad–Mumbai high-speed rail corridor, while the Eastern and Western freight corridors are already operational across multiple states.