India’s shiny new metros are costly white elephants

Above ground, New Delhi is one of the world’s most unwelcoming capitals. Traffic is chaotic, air quality abysmal, and the crowds overwhelming. Underground is a different story: The Delhi Metro’s air-conditioned efficiency makes you feel like you’re in a completely different city.

It is easy to understand why everyone in India now wants a similar system. The government announced this month that 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of metro lines have been built across the country. This is indeed remarkable, given that Indian towns have long struggled to build world-class public infrastructure. But the Delhi Metro is now one of the longest in the world — only Moscow, London and New York have larger networks outside mainland China — and 22 other Indian cities have metros in various stages of completion. Authorities promise that another 1,000 kilometers will be finished soon.

It's such a pity, then, that so many of the others are far less popular than predicted. Even in large towns with millions of residents, like Lucknow and Jaipur, they look more like political prestige projects than genuine attempts to transform urban transit. And in India’s megacities, metros are underperforming badly. Mumbai’s ridership is about 30% of what its planners promised, and Bengaluru’s is just 6%.


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What went wrong? Everyone has different answers. The parliamentary committee that oversees urban development argues that the problem is last-mile connectivity: If you leave a metro station, you can’t connect to buses or any other form of public transport. They are 21st-century islands, cut off from their host towns’ 20th-century infrastructure.

The government’s official auditor, meanwhile, says some were built too soon, years or decades before they were needed. Yet others point out that a focus on getting metros to too many cities works against expanding any one of them — and only when a network reaches a certain minimum threshold does ridership take off. If there are too few stations, or trains don’t come often enough, it’s hard to get riders to switch modes.

Even the Delhi Metro, in my experience, is hard to switch to. From my study window, I can see elevated trains pulling into my local station less than 150 meters away, and there’s a direct line from there to my workplace. But the stations themselves are so badly designed — vast, concrete monstrosities squatting above the roads, with oddly placed entrances – that trudging from my door to the platform takes 20 minutes. In that much time I could hail an electric three-wheeler and get to work, paying just over twice the metro fare.

The Delhi Metro has succeeded because it isn’t really a metro. Its stations are far apart, unlike other systems worldwide where people can hop in and out to make quick journeys across town. It works because it functions as the suburban rail connection the city never had. People can get into the big city in comfort from the endless satellite townships that have sprung up in the dusty plains around the capital.

Some metropolises — Kolkata and Mumbai — have working light or suburban rail. Most were built pre-independence, and haven’t been updated in decades. Other, newer urban centers never had a suburban rail network at all, even as their populations exploded. The real lesson from Delhi is that India needs better local train services, not shiny new metros.

But metros are easier to sell to local politicians — they all want to inaugurate a new station in the city center. They may be far more expensive than suburban trains, but are paradoxically easy to finance because development banks from countries like Japan and Germany are happy to lend the cash at concessional rates, as long as you buy their carriages. And, best of all, you can set up a new organization to build each one of them, rather than having to revive wheezing, state-owned Indian Railways.

The costs are beginning to add up. More than 40% of India’s urban development budget is being spent on metros, according to parliament; that’s money that could be spent on new electric bus networks or charging stations for three-wheelers.

In general, India’s the opposite of China: If Beijing built too much infrastructure, New Delhi built too little. But the flashy new metro systems in smaller cities are an exception. Their empty, expensive carriages and echoing stations are the nation’s white elephants, and one day the bill will come due.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)