Tanoj Kumar remembers the morning two years ago when he woke up to find a foot-high cylindrical concrete structure outside his 25-year-old home. Around 100 other homes in the 400-year-old Dungra village —about eight kilomteres from Vapi in Gujarat — woke up to the same inexplicable sight. It was the first time the village learnt about the government's ambitious Bullet Train project and that their homes lay in its path.

At first though, the villagers, mostly adivasis, had little clue what the blocks, placed overnight in their village, each with a number, meant. A few days later, says 32-year-old Kumar, when we meet him at his verandah where he is sitting with his two-year-old daughter, a few officials came to the village. "We don't know who they were or which government agency they were from. They neither showed us any ID nor were they accompanied by any local government official that we were familiar with," he adds. "All that they told us was that our village lies in the path of the Bullet train and it—or at least parts of it, and especially the homes with the cement structure in front of them—would be demolished to make way for the train," says Kumar who works at a private firm in Vapi.