Train collides with school van in West Bengal's Murshidabad, at least three dead

A Shinkansen bullet train. | “India-Japan discussions on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed train are progressing well. Japan will provide E10 series train in the early 2030s. The train is still under development. Meanwhile, construction work is rapidly progressing. First section will be opened in 2027,” a spokesperson from the Ministry of Railways said. The clarification comes in response to a recent critical social media post by a former Japanese Minister regarding the project, which will be India’s first bullet train network. In the post, Hideki Makihara, a member of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, had blamed New Delhi for the timeline delays. He had also flagged concerns over the Japanese side allegedly being “excluded from the signalling system” of the high-speed network. The MEA clarified that the statement represented an “individual opinion” that stands at “considerable variance with facts”.Japan has been playing a key role in the implementation of the mega project in terms of financing it as well as sharing technology and engineering expertise.Railway officials said that India and Japan had agreed to start the operations with an Indian high-speed train, which is slated to run at an operational speed of 280 kmph.The train is currently being developed indigenously by BEML Limited and the Integral Coach Factory. “We will start off by using the indigenous train because India wants to make the Surat-Bilimora section in Gujarat operational by August 2027, and the Japanese E10 trains will only arrive in 2030,” officials said. Launch in 2027Civil construction work along the 508-km corridor has accelerated rapidly, officials said. The Railway Ministry has awarded a tender to German multinational Siemens for installation of signalling systems along the bullet train corridor stretch, with a view to begin the operations by 2027. “The signalling equipment has been ordered accordingly and is in line with international specifications. No Japanese offer was received in this context. The project execution is in line with the common goal of starting the high-speed train project at the earliest,” the MEA spokesperson stated. “This interim phase will allow Indian Railways to develop operational familiarity and establish system confidence before transitioning to the 320 kmph Japanese E10 sets in 2030,” a senior source in the Railway Ministry said. India is deploying the European Train Control System (ETCS), which is a modern, radio-based digital signalling architecture. “The radio-based ETCS system represents a significant upgrade over legacy Second World War-era coaxial copper cable systems, which suffer from signal leakage and are highly vulnerable to localised copper cable theft,” the Railway Ministry source said.The source added that the E10 Shinkansen trains can also run on ETCS technology, and its primary purpose was to act as a standardised, interoperable signalling system. Quoting the Taiwan High-Speed Rail example, the source added that such interoperability – Japanese-built Shinkansen trains running on European-style signalling network – has been a practice globally. (With PTI inputs) Published - July 17, 2026 10:31 pm IST