Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Thursday, 12 December, told British billionaire Richard Branson that he would study the Mumbai-Pune ultrafast Hyperloop transport project and take further decisions.
Branson met Thackeray in Mumbai to clear misunderstandings and gauge the new administration's interest in the USD 10 billion project, which promises to cut the travel time between Mumbai and Pune to less than half and hour.
Branson had earlier made it clear that the entire cost of the project will be borne by the private sector and it will not depend on any funding from the state. He had a call before attending the meeting with Thackeray.
"It is just a courtesy call (with Thackeray) and also to ensure that any misunderstandings regarding the project are cleared. When there is a change in administration and you’ve a big project going on, it is important to have a courtesy call, Branson told reporters here.
Uddhav Thackeray and the various coalition people that he has around them need to meet people who are doing big projects or those wanting to do big projects in their state," he said.
"We just need to see whether the new government is so keen as the old government (on the project)," he added.
Branson said engineers at the group’s Hyperloop facility in Las Vegas are working on the project and they are ready to "get going quite soon" with the Mumbai-Pune project.
Hyperloop is the name given to a technology originally conceived by Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk, wherein vacuum is used to transport people very fast. The technology is yet to be commercially launched and multiple companies are working on it.
Branson's Virgin Hyperloop One had stunned all by announcing the project when Devendra Fadnavis was the state's chief minister and had promised to get the project going by 2020.
The Fadnavis government had accorded infrastructure status to the Mumbai-Pune Hyperloop project that seeks to reduce the travel time between the two cities to just 23 minutes.
The Hyperloop project will link central Pune with Mumbai in under 35 minutes, as opposed to the current over 3.5-hour journey by road. There are approximately 75 million passenger journeys between Mumbai and Pune annually and Virgin Hyperloop One's system will be supporting as many as 200 million passengers annually.
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