On Monday, a framed picture at Gate 4 of the Ministry of Railways building in New Delhi displayed a sleek, aerodynamic train—with a grey body, orange and gold accents, and a rounded nose evoking Japan’s Shinkansen moving along an elevated viaduct through a verdant landscape. It seemed the government had finally given a visual identity to its most ambitious infrastructure project.
However, an image, likely a digital rendering, displayed at a ministry gate is not the real bullet train. So what is the actual status of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (MAHSR) corridor nearly nine years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid its foundation stone?
What numbers say
The most reliable recent update comes from Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who released the construction statistics as of May 4.
According to information shared by the minister on social media, 349 km of viaduct the elevated, bridge-like structure that carries 90% of the corridor above roads, rivers and existing railway lines has been completed along the 508-km route, along with 443 km of piers, the supporting pillars that hold up the viaduct.
More than 7,700 overhead equipment (OHE) masts—the electric poles that support the wires supplying power to the trains—have been installed along 179 km of the main line.
More than 5.7 lakh noise barriers have gone up along 288 km of the stretch, and 374 track-kilometers of track bed base construction has been completed (covering roughly 187 route kilometres), with the laying progressing incrementally.
In Maharashtra, where progress had previously been slow because of land acquisition issues, 5 km of the crucial 21-km tunnel connecting Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) and Shilphata has now been excavated.
The National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL), the government agency implementing the project, stated in a Lok Sabha response in February 2026 that the entire 1,389.5 hectares of required land has been acquired and all statutory approvals have been secured.
Speed of execution has picked up
In early May, Vaishnaw stated that India is currently laying 15 km of high-speed rail track each month on the bullet train corridor. He noted that the construction pace has been increased from the originally estimated 2 km per month. He attributed this progress to IITs, industry partners, and railway engineers, adding that similar projects worldwide have achieved an average of only about 0.5 km per month.
Such progress would represent a sharp break from the project’s difficult initial phase, when land conflicts in Maharashtra, political opposition, and the Covid pandemic together caused repeated delays. The first completion deadline had been set for August 2022.
One of the most significant developments of the past week emerged from Mumbai. On May 17, the NHSRCL announced that the cutter head of India’s largest tunnel boring machine (TBM) the massive rotating disc that performs the excavation had been successfully lowered into a shaft at Vikhroli in Mumbai. The cutter head weighs 350 tonnes and has a diameter of 13.6 metres, approximately equal to the width of a four-lane highway.
