India’s cabinet has cleared a $14.7 billion Japanese proposal to build its first bullet train line, one of India’s biggest foreign investments in its infrastructure sector. The decision ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit gives Japan an early lead over China, which is also bidding to build high-speed rail lines across large parts of India’s congested and largely British-era system.

Japan had offered to finance 80% of the cost of the train linking financial capital Mumbai with Ahmedabad, the commercial centre of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, at an interest rate of less than 1%. Modi and Abe have forged a strong relationship, seeking to expand commercial and defence ties and push back against the rising influence of China across Asia.

Japan’s International Cooperation Agency completed a feasibility study in July on the 505-km (315-mile) Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor offering to cut travel time to two hours from the current seven to eight hours.

China was in September given the right to assess the feasibility of a high-speed train link between Delhi and Chennai, in the south, after getting clearances from India’s security agencies wary of Chinese involvement in infrastructure areas such as telecoms and railways. French and Spanish firms are also conducting studies into building two of the routes in a quadrilateral of high-speed train lines criss-crossing the country that would drastically reduce travel times.