Railway in Nepal : High-Speed 20 minutes Triangular Intercity Connection

I always wondered about why everyone from every city or corner of our country wants to live in Kathmandu valley. Simply put I got my answer as soon as I came to valley to pursue my higher education. It has more opportunities and facilities to every man who lands his/her foot in this place. Valley is a great, vibrant, diverse city. But, personally I find Kathmandu as not so great city to live due to it's pollution, water problem and traffic jams. And all the time I was highly irritated with these traffic jams, wished there was a way to get to valley from my own hometown under 30 minutes. As I mentioned my hometown "Hetauda" is about 80km by the shortest route and about 220km through the other great city "Bharatpur" from the valley. Seeing the developed infrastructures of the developed contries and even our neighbouring country India has always envied me personally even though I couldn't contribute much on from the individual effort of mine. And I am fascinated by their high speed railway networks seeing a "Delhi metro" for the first time on my India trip made me desire a high speed connection between Hetauda and Kathmandu Valley. I know even thinking such a thing seems totally out of mind in our country where it took nearly 40 years to complete a water supply project for the Kathmandu Valley which is the countries capital. But there are also the projects like Bheri-Babai Diversion projects that makes me really optimistic about things that might happen. After returning from trip to India, what I did was made three points in Google Maps to connect and let us say made a triangle ABC, where A is Hetauda, B is Kathamdnu and C is Chitwan. Now, I don't know how did I got this in my mind but it was during my bachelor's, I had this wishful thinking of connecting these 3 cities with high speed railway networks and making them 20 minutes cities. 20 minutes cities here refers as it must only take 20 minutes at most to reach from one city to another.I started giving this thing a thought about will that be even really possible to do it within 20 minutes and started googling things and came to know there are problems for railways when there are lots of mountains to go thorugh as railroads really hates elevation, although the distance between Hetauda and Kathmandu made it seems to do at most 20 minutes possible. I also thought if we solve the problem of altitude between Hetauda and Kathmandu than so can be done with the Chitwan and Kathmandu but later came to know that if theres inclination more than 4% than the railway might not be as efficient as we can expect it to be. But, seeing the miraculous development of railway networks of China made me think it is for sure possible and being an engineering student I was always optimistic on things cause we engineers make the impossible possible. 

Is this project really a necessasity ?

I would say a big YES for this project, with futher plans to extend this railway network and not just stay put into these three cities. Now if you ask me why yes than at first thing I would like to mention is the traffic jams, poor & bumpy roads, to reduce the unmanaged urbanization, build better public transportation network, ease the mode of transport and to decentralize things to other cities from Kathmandu as it feels congested here in Kathmandu.

What are the things that we need to complete this project and how can we get those things ?

Money is the crucial factor that plays vital role from an individual level to the country level. And to construct such a huge infrastructure we need huge amount of money.

Project Cost:

Moving on to the practical part even though I fantasized this 20 minutes intercity highspeed railway, the question of how much will it cost to build such a huge infrastructural project never done in our country and will the project even be profitable after it's completion aroused to me. I made a quick assumption to how much would be the cost with a reference to Kerung-Kathmandu Railway Project (KKRP) details which was hot topic few years back. In a simple thinking of mine KKRP is more complex project than my fantasized project, which is why I made some considerations in my assumptions. It was $8 billion to complete the 72 km KKRP project, where as I assumed around $15 billion for my fantasized project of 20 minutes of triangular city to get completed. Complex part of this intercity connection mainly lies in the Kathmandu to Chitwan and Hetauda to Kathmandu as we have to go through lots of the mountains. Where as Chitwan to Hetauda is the part of the project with the less complexity. About profitability if we see it only in terms of money or cash than there is not even a chance for the projects like these to be started anytime soon in our country. So the profit from projects like these shouldn't only be measured in terms of cash flow.

Funding:

Now as I assumed to the budget I got thought of how do these mega-infrastructures get funds and started googling again. Than I came to know about some of the potential sources of funding, which are as follows:

Government Funding: Governments at all levels can fund the project through tax revenues or burrowing.

Private Investment: Private parties could provide financial, operational and technical support in exchange of right for providing them the certain amount of profit.

Bonds: Issuance of bonds in the name of project can be done, which are the debts that are repaid with interest over time.

Foreign Investment: Foreign investment can be inflowed for such projects making a joint venture with Nepali investing partner which way not only helps us to gain some investment but also some knowledge sharing might occur among the parties which can be benificial.

Supranational Financial Institutions: Another option for the money to start such a huge project is the loans from supranational financial institutions such as world bank and asian development bank.

Now knowing the project cost and available sources for the funding I think we surely can make project like this happen by getting our funds from the various sources as mentioned above.

Except for money we need the manpower and technology for the construction. We have enough semi-skilled and unskilled manpower who can be the part of the project to get completed by time. Whereas, we lack in skilled manpower and experience for such infrastructure as it is first of our kind which leaves us to seek helps from the foreign nationals who have gained expertise and experience in this field. As we don't have any such kind of infrastructures, we lack behind in the technologcal advancement required for such project therefore we have to import the technologies we require.  

How long will it take to complete this project ?

It might take anywhere around 15 years for the full phase completion of the project if everything goes right and as planned.

*Note: This is my fantasized thoughtful thinking which I happened to have during my bachelor's so that I could attend my college from my home. I wish this to come true in the near future.

-Sabal Sapkota