The bullet train's yearly bill lands on the state: about Rp1 trillion

Now that the state has stepped in behind the Jakarta-Bandung bullet train, there is a price on it. The finance ministry is preparing to take on about 1 trillion rupiah a year, roughly US$56.5 million, in repayments on the line's loans, the South China Morning Post reports. Officials say the load is manageable because the debt has been restructured over 80 years. Restructuring means the repayment was stretched out: each year's payment is smaller, but the payments keep coming for much longer.

The reason anyone is doing this sits in the build. The project was planned at $6.02 billion and ended up near $7.3 billion, more than a billion dollars above the estimate, and that gap squeezed the state companies that built and now run the line. The operator, Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China or KCIC, is a joint venture between Chinese investors and Indonesian state firms led by the national rail operator KAI. What passengers got is real: a trip that takes up to three hours by car takes 45 minutes on the train.

The argument abroad is about who ends up paying for the part that did not work. Critics quoted in the report say taxpayers will be subsidising the project's losses, since money that leaves the ministry each year for this line is money not doing anything else. What the report does not give is the other half of the sum: how much the train itself brings in.

Why it matters

If you never ride the train, you are still on the payment plan. Watch whether the ministry publishes the repayment schedule next to KCIC's ticket income, because the gap between those two numbers is what the public actually pays. The same question is worth holding onto as Jakarta lines up its next big foreign-funded railway.