Summary of discussions

This paper summarises a roundtable held in New Delhi, India, on the 18th and 19th December, 2013. This roundtable was convened to examine the key factors that drive the costs of High-Speed Rail (HSR) investment and review the economic benefits delivered by HSR services. This summary draws on a series of presentations made to the roundtable including an international review (Nash, 2013a) and national reviews from France (Crozet, 2013a), Japan (Kurosaki, 2013a), China (Wu, 2013a), Italy (Croccolo, 2013), the UK (Nash, 2013b) and Chinese Taipei (Chang, 2013). In addition, a series of presentations surveyed the prospects for HSR in India, including contributions from Singh, Pillai, Goyal, Raghuram and Pal (all 2013), whilst a presentation on Korea (Lee, 2012) and earlier work on HSR (Asian Institute of Transport Development, 2007) were tabled. This report is also informed by introductory remarks made by Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission of the Government of India, Mallikarjun Khan of the Indian Railways, and K.L. Thapar of the Asian Institute of Transport Development. In the rest of this introductory section we will outline what is meant by HSR for the purposes of this roundtable and set out a very brief history. We will then in section 2 outline some of the key objectives of the roundtable. In section 3 we will consider the related issue of the key objectives for HSR investments. The kernel of this paper will focus on the cost and benefits of HSR (section 4), including consideration of demand impacts, costs, benefits and pricing and competition. The conditions for financial and social break-even will be considered in section 5 and funding issues examined in section 6. The Indian context will be considered in section 7, before some conclusions are drawn in section 8.