India Rejects Ex-Japanese Minister's Criticism of Its Role in Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train Line

New Delhi: Responding to a former Japanese minister's remarks blaming India for what he called the “failure” of the Shinkansen-linked Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail (MAHSR) project to move forward, New Delhi has called the ex-official's view his “individual opinion” that is “at considerable variance with facts”.

Hideki Makihara, a former cabinet minister who belongs to the Liberal Democratic Party that is currently the senior member in Japan's ruling coalition, had said on X that India is entirely to blame for the “failure of this project to progress”.

“For the sake of the reputation of all the Japanese personnel who worked so hard on this, I must state that the failure of this project to progress is 100% the fault of the Indian side,” Makihara, who said he was involved with the majority Japanese-funded MAHSR at one point, wrote.

Asked about his remarks, external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal on Friday (July 17) stated that talks between India and Japan on MAHSR “are in fact progressing well” and the former minister's comment “is an individual opinion and at considerable variance with facts”.

As part of MAHSR Japan will provide bullet trains from its E10 series but only by the early 2030s, Jaiswal said, adding that this train is still under development. With a first section of the project set to open next year, “both sides agreed to start the operations with Indian high-speed [trains]” – i.e. as opposed to Japanese ones – the spokesperson said.

Signalling equipment for the project “has been ordered accordingly and is in line with international specifications”, said Jaiswal. “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.”

Jaiswal's references to E10 and MAHSR's signalling systems assume significance because Makihara wrote his X post in the context of a Japanese railway engineer stating that though the project was intended to be developed with the use of Japan-origin technologies, India went on to preclude this possibility.

Engineer Isao Tsujimura, who said in his Toyo Keizai article Tuesday that he lives in Delhi and works as a consultant for the city metro's rolling stock, wrote that after India disagreed with prices for the E5 series that MAHSR was originally based on, it appeared to pursue locally made trains for the project – at least for its inaugural section – especially after Vande Bharat's rollout.

India then sought European signalling systems for MAHSR, he said, leading him to feel “that the chances of Japanese rolling stock or signaling systems being adopted had all but vanished”. Given that “Shinkansen rolling stock and signaling systems are inextricably linked … it appears inevitable that Japan will ultimately be excluded from the rolling stock component of the project.”

Tsujimura also pointed out that while the India-Japan joint statement released after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's August 2025 visit to Tokyo specifically mentioned Japanese signalling systems in connection with MAHSR, the communique issued after Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi's visit to Delhi earlier this month omitted any reference to them.

“It is safe to assume that the Indian Shinkansen project is effectively dead … it is no exaggeration to say that the project’s failure was essentially an own goal by the Japanese government,” Tsujimura wrote in his article. “There were hopes that Prime Minister Takaichi would successfully overturn the existing plan during her visit to India but that did not happen,” he added.

Eighty-one percent of MAHSR's cost was to be funded by the Japanese government. A ‘memorandum of cooperation’ the two sides signed in 2015 stated that the project would be “developed with the use of Japanese high speed rail technologies (i.e. the Shinkansen system) and experiences”.

In his post citing Tsujimura's article, Makihara, who was minister of justice for one month until November 2024 and previously a minister of state, also said that in his experience with MAHSR “what stood out most was the outrageous behavior of the Indian side during international meetings and negotiations.”

He went on to accuse his interlocutors of reneging on their word and persisting “in pushing their own self-interests right to the very end”.

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