As Budget nears, it’s time to ask if taxpayers need more shiny Metros

Passengers wait to board a train at Mantri Sampige Square Metro station, operated by Bangalore Metro Rail Corp. (BMRCL) | Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

India needs a public transport revolution, not just kilometres of Metro lines.

India has an over 650-km Metro rail network under construction, announced the urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri recently. As many as 15 cities are joining the metro bandwagon soon and 500 km-long lines are already operational, he said. Yet, as the interim Budget approaches, now is the time to ask: Is this the burden taxpayers across the country need?

The Metro revolution

The Metro revolution in India appears to have matured with networks no longer the preserve of sprawling metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai or Bangalore. It represents an egalitarian and inclusive approach.

There are two ways to look at this development. For a country perpetually judging itself by comparing its progress with China’s relentless pace, even this appears a trivial achievement. The Shanghai Metro is stated to reach an astounding 1,000 km by 2025 and other major Chinese cities are not far behind. Can India ever hope to catch up, let alone compete with the country of the dragon?

India must work harder or risk being left behind, or at least that is what conventional wisdom suggests.

The Modi government with its ferocious appetite for large public projects and its much-vaunted ability to execute them in sharp contrast to the plodding attitude of its predecessor further affirms this narrative. The execution and the feel-good factor it generates often supplant practicality and usefulness.

The primordial appeal of a shiny and first-world Metro network in India’s cities, which are often described as overgrown villages with dilapidated infrastructure, is quite understandable.

But China has built plenty of White elephants—the Shanghai airport maglev line is a prime example—and India, with its significantly smaller economy, must ask harder questions: Are the Metro lines India is building delivering their promise? Is it the most useful expenditure?

Ridership woes in non-Metro cities

Let’s start with a couple of examples. According to the detailed project report (DPR) prepared by the Delhi Metro, the first phase of Jaipur metro was supposed to have a ridership of two lakh. Three years after its first trains chugged off, the actual ridership is a much more sobering 18,000. So dire is the financial situation of Jaipur Metro that it cannot even meet its operational expenses without a government subsidy. No wonder then that the Vasundhara Raje government was extremely reluctant to fund the Metro’s second phase, almost ensuring its death knell as a viable system.

Or consider the Lucknow Metro. Brilliantly executed by a team of ex-Delhi Metro officials led by its redoubtable managing director Kumar Keshav, it breached the 10,000-mark with considerable difficulty.

Even if the ridership improves significantly after the first phase is concluded within the next few months, it is hard to imagine that the Metro would be able to justify its Rs 7,000-crore cost. Even worse is the state of the Gurgaon Rapid Metro, built and financed by the scandal-hit IL&FS.

The much-vaunted Delhi Metro is struggling to achieve a daily ridership of three million. As senior journalist TN Ninan has pointed out, Delhi Metro has one of the lowest passenger-track ratios in the world, despite being a world-class system in a city where roads are permanently choked and riding a bus remains a traumatising experience.

Or consider this: the single-line 28km-long Kolkata Metro, a legacy of India’s socialist past—its ethos perfectly reflecting it—carries six lakh passengers versus Delhi’s expansive and modern 330-km network that ferries barely 28 lakh.

Why the Metro dream went off track

First, India’s existing Metro policy posits a Metro system for every city with a population of more than one million citizens. India has over 27 cities which exceed that artificial limit; metro systems are simply not a viable option for all such urban conglomerations.

There are far more economically sensible options, including acquiring buses and building dedicated lanes for their movement, which would deliver public transport without bankrupting the local governments.

As a corollary, metro systems have a strong network effect and therefore standalone systems of limited lengths must be strongly resisted in the future. There is some belated recognition with the Centre turning down proposed Metro networks in cities like Varanasi, but this principle needs to be firmly adhered to in the future.

Second, public transport must be treated as an integrated system with every arm of the government engaged in encouraging it, while being network agnostic. Consider Delhi Metro. The state-run Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) has its maximum fare capped at Rs 15, while Delhi Metro has fares as high as Rs 60. Not because DTC is magically more efficient but because it receives a direct subsidy of nearly Rs 2,000 crore from the Delhi government while the metro is expected not only to meet its operational expenditure but also discharge its humongous debt obligations of Rs 25,000 crore.

Government agencies like Delhi Multi-Modal Integrated Transport System (DIMTS) remain toothless advisory bodies while each wing of the government works to maximise its little fiefdom.

Contrast this with Transport for London, which not only controls the Underground but also the bus system and regulates the private taxis and shared cabs!

Unless Delhi and other major Indian cities display such commonality of purpose, their expensive world-class systems will remain severely underutilised.

Third, don’t treat the Metro as some shiny hill of distant development but ruthlessly, as the means to an end. It can’t replace the various failures of Indian governance, but is an exigency to ensure affordable and meaningful public transport.

Indian politicians, forever striving for the next easy frontier to demonstrate that they have delivered on their multitudes of promises, have fetishised Metro systems. Therein lie the financial ruination and diversion of limited public money from much more pressing concerns.

Building systems for the future may indeed sound tempting but India has far more immediate demands for such abstract dreams. ‘Overbuild and the passengers will eventually come’ may not be the most appropriate approach in a system where Indian governments struggle to deliver routine public services.

A public transport revolution

India and its major cities urgently need public transport. Delhi registers 1,800 vehicles a day—a pace which is simply unsustainable. No number of flashy flyovers or new trans-harbour links can compensate for the death of 2,500 on the overcrowded urban railways in Mumbai every year.

That is simply intolerable.

And so, the public transport revolution needs a more focused approach than simply counting the miles of Metro networks or the cities reached or the cute but ultimately unsustainable desire to show China its place.

It would require an Indian solution crafted to solve the challenges of this fascinatingly idiosyncratic land.

The author writes on politics and policy. He tweets at @retributions