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The Economic Effects of a Hyperloop Line connecting 2 of India's Largest Cities

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Indradeep Ghosh (MDAE), Tushar Kanade (FTI Consulting)
Thursday 11 April 2019 at 4:00 pm (Hong Kong time, GMT +8)
IAS2042, Lo Ka Chung Building, HKUST, Clear Water Bay

In late 2017 and early 2018, the Government of Maharashtra (one of India's 29 states) embarked on plans to build a Hyperloop network that will connect the city of Mumbai to the city of Pune, reducing the travel time between the two from more than three hours to under 30 minutes. This paper describes some of the possible effects of such a development. It introduces a new concept called “cost-of-distance” arbitrage to capture the principal economic force that will be activated by a Hyperloop line, and then offers a contextual analysis of how the urban landscapes of Mumbai and Pune might be altered by the line. The paper also presents some preliminary thoughts on how policymakers might adapt extant institutions to the prospect of a Hyperloop line so as to derive the maximum economic benefits from such a revolutionary tool of urban transformation.

 

The paper is co-authored with Mr Tushar Kanade.

 

About the Speakers

Indradeep Ghosh is Dean (Faculty) and Associate Professor at the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics (MDAE). He has a PhD in Economics from MIT, where he was trained primarily as a macroeconomist. Although he still teaches macroeconomics, his research interests have evolved in a more interdisciplinary direction, and he currently thinks and writes about questions at the intersection of economics and the other social sciences and of economics and the humanities. He has published peer-reviewed articles in economics journals and humanities journals, and his co-authored critique of neoclassical economics was also chosen as the lead-essay in the centenary edition of the Quarterly Journal of Speech which is the world's oldest journal of communication and rhetorical studies. He is also deeply interested in economics pedagogy and has published a paper in the International Journal of Economics Education on what he calls "dialogical economics".

 

Tushar Kanade is a Senior Consultant in FTI Consulting's Mumbai office and serves as a Public Policy Advisor to Virgin Hyperloop One. Previously, he was appointed as one of the youngest Special Advisors in the State by the Government of Maharashtra and served as a ‘Special Advisor – Hyperloop’, working directly with the Metropolitan Commissioner and CEO of the Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority. He was also a 2017-2018 Chief Minister’s Fellow at the Government of Maharashtra, where he was solely credited for initiating and accelerating the landmark Mumbai-Pune Hyperloop project since inception in August 2017, in collaboration with Los Angeles-based Virgin Hyperloop One. His current research work focuses on the economic effects of a potential North-West-South 'Hyperloop' corridor in India. Prior to working with the Chief Minister’s Office, he worked with a Member of Legislative Council on non-profit strategy and with Deloitte’s India offices in the infrastructure and renewable energy sectors. Throughout a collegiate debating career spanning more than 150 debates over six years, he has represented India at the World Universities Debating Championships in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Tushar was selected as an Adam Smith Scholar at, and holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Economics from, the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics (MDAE), University of Mumbai, where he wrote his Master's thesis on the 'Urban Economic Effects of the Mumbai-Pune-Bengaluru Hyperloop corridor in India' in 2017. (LinkedIn)

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