Besides many things, the difficulty about the building a project for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop competition is that everything has to be built from scratch as there are no working models explained by Prithvi Sanker, head of Business Development at Hyperloop India.

Subsequently, the team that is the only contestant for Musk’s competition from India received a lot of support from people in the industry.

By the time, the team submitted a preliminary design brief they realised the requirement of people with knowledge in various fields such as electronic control systems, CAD design, aerodynamics. They, soon got 25 to 30 more students for the core engineering team.After their final design got accepted, they recruited more people from other institutes such as IIM Ahmedabad, National Institute of Design. From a team of five, Now Team Hyperloop India is a consortium of college students as well as industry organisations.

Hyperloop in India

J Munirathnam, a mobility expert, says that given the fact that Rail India Technical and Economic Service is one of the partners for the Hyperloop project is a clincher and will be useful in implementation stage for the hyperloop in India. “Otherwise technology transfer from different products like Bullet Train/ICE/TGV will be a costly affair. Their experience in rail projects across India and in International market. is unparalleled.” With regard to the Team Hyperloop India, Munirathnam says they have high chance of getting into next level due to support from academia, technology partners, startup ecosystem, mass transport operators like Namma Metro.

Dr Ashish Verma, a professor of transportation engineering at IISc, is more cautious and says, “Presently, not much is known about the how proven, sustainable, and cost-effective hyperloop technology is. High speed trains, maglev, are other alternatives that already exists. It is wiser for a developing economy like India to invest in a proven technology only,” he says.