Bullet train

After years of international marketing, India became a rare buyer for the Shinkansen.

A group of farmers affected by the project have petitioned the Gujarat High Court, which has sought the government’s stand on the plea on Nov. 22, according to court documents. The farmers have also questioned the government’s power to acquire farm land for public-private partnership projects, documents show.

The courts had earlier refused to put the land acquisition process on hold.

The National High Speed Rail Corporation, which is building the Indian project, said there are no funding gaps despite the delay in land acquisition. The date of operation for the project will be in August 2022, said Dhananjay Kumar, a spokesman for the company, a year before its official completion target. The company is “committed to take care of the interests of the affected farmers,” he said.

Farmer protests have stalled projects in India in the past. A decade back, Tata Motors Ltd. had to delay selling the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, after violent protest by farmers forced the owner of Jaguar Land Rover to abandon a factory in the state of West Bengal and instead choose a new site in western Gujarat. Land acquisition has also been an issue in the potential construction of an oil refinery with Saudi Aramco in Maharashtra.

India isn’t the only country where a planned bullet train has struggled to take off because of land acquisition problems.

A $6 billion high-speed rail project connecting Jakarta and Bandung is entangled in Indonesia’s infamous red tape and difficulties in acquiring land for the project. While construction was meant to begin in August 2016, only 7.6 percent of the work has been done on the 142-kilometer railway line at the end of August,