India, Feb. 13 -- One of Nirmala Sitharaman's most interesting announcements during her Budget speech was the proposal to build several more high-speed rail (HSR) corridors across the country in addition to the existing under-construction Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail corridor. The new corridors, namely Mumbai-Pune, Pune-Hyderabad, Hyderabad-Chennai, Chennai-Bengaluru, Bengaluru-Hyderabad, Delhi-Varanasi and Varanasi-Siliguri, will have a massive capital expenditure outlay of INR 2.78 lakh crore for almost 4,000 kilometres of dedicated high-speed rail track and trainsets.

There have been some very valid questions asked about this massive capital outlay, given that it will take over a decade, although work on these corridors ought to g...