PAKISTANI politicians love to punch above their weight.

With the return of the PML-N to power, it was but natural to expect the comeback of large infrastructure projects that could capture the public imagination and keep people in thrall at least for an entire election cycle. It does not matter whether the government has the money for such fancy projects or whether they are actually executed. The `bullet train` project has that kind of power of pushing unsuspecting voters in Punjab to pursue an illusion. Recently, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz formed a working group to look into the feasibility of operating a high-speed train between the two power nodes of Lahore and Rawalpindi in the province. Her media team has been branding the scheme as the first bullet train project in Pakistan. But, as they say, what`s in a name? One can call it anything as long as it can cut the travel time between the two cities to less than two and a half hours. The question, however, is whether Pakistan is ready for a bullet train, or a high-speed train, at all? Her father, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, had also dreamt of running a bullet train between Peshawar and Karachi during his last term. However, the Chinese response, when he went to them for financing and technology for the project, woke him up. More or less the same financial and technical hurdles have been pointed out by experts to the much smaller and slower train project of the Punjab chief minister. But again, one is constrained to ask: are we ready for such trains? Do we even need them? There are no two opinions about modernising and upgrading the existing dilapidated railway infrastructure for safer and faster connectivity for both passenger traffic and trade.

But that does not require bullet trains or high-speed trains. The focus should be on upgrading the entire railway infrastructure and expanding the rail network under the Mainline project rather than creating islands for fancy trains. Even the revised ML-1 scheme would nearly treble the speed to 140-160kmph, which should be sufficient for our needs for many decades to come. There are countries that do not have bullet trains. Yet their railways provide efficient, reliable and comfortable facilities to the passengers. We must learn to walk before we can run. Or be prepared to stumble along the way once again.