These boosts in technology from Google and Japan are great, but they don’t come close to what India actually needs if it wants to give its railway system a major overhaul, Gil tells CityLab. ”The big problem is not a technological one; it’s a political problem,” he says. “It’s about increasing the capacity of the railways, and money is not going to resolve it because you have fundamental institutional obstacles.”

The problem of acquiring land

Such obstacles include acquiring land, which the government will need to build a high-speed railway. “I don’t see it happening, to be honest,” says Gil. “It is a very complicated bureaucracy that gets in the way of trying to get things done.”

Many projects in the past have stalled because of judicial fights over plots of land. Take, for example, the 2005 plan to build the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC), a network of six corridors that were to run parallel to the existing Indian Railway. It was to increase the speed and efficiency for freight transport, and ease congestion.

The government needed to acquire roughly 6,000 hectares of land at the periphery of eight cities to complete the project, but farmers and other landowners understandably didn’t want to part with their land. The project came to a halt in 2010 after the Ministry of Railways refrained from forcibly taking land and proposed instead to hold individual negotiations. Ten years after the initial proposal of DFC, the project is still under construction.

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Lack of political will and funding

Another large part of the problem is that Indian railways, unlike in other countries, have their own ministry. “So railways are a national political instrument in India,” Gil says. “Nothing happens in railways that is not scrutinized by elected leaders—and that hasn’t changed since India gained autonomy.”

That means politicians are making decisions based not necessarily on what’s best for the system, but on what will help keep them in power. This may help explain why, despite being relied upon to funnel millions of passengers each day, the railway still suffers from a lack of funding.

The government, says Gil, has so far lacked the will to increase passenger fares because it is an unpopular suggestion. Instead, they hike up the cost of freight transport to subsidize passenger rides. What India gets as a result, he says, is a vicious cycle: Companies choose to transport goods via highways because doing so by train has become too expensive and inefficient. That results in a lack of funding needed to make rail improvements for commuters, who are also leaving the railways for highways.