India's Metro movement
If there is one thing that’s common in most of India’s big cities, it’s traffic. The 2021 TomTom Traffic Index puts Mumbai as the world's 5th most congested city. Bengaluru is not far behind at 10, with the capital, Delhi, at 11. Commuters across these three megacities lost an average of 114 hours due to traffic in 2021. Rapid expansion of the country’s roadways and increased car registrations in the last few years have played their part in worsening traffic flow. So how is the government planning on tackling this? Well, it seems like they are leaning heavily towards one solution: metros.
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India’s first metro operations began in Kolkata in 1984. Despite its initial proposal in 1919, followed by another in 1949, work on the network only began in 1972. When it finally opened, it featured 3.4 km of line with five stations. But despite all the bureaucratic hurdles that stood in its way, more metro systems were soon being built across the country.
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Thus began India’s metro movement. The Delhi Metro opened in 2002 and is a marvel of engineering and design. It features almost 350 km of track and boasts a grand total of 230 stations, taking 14th place in the world for both metrics. An average ridership of 1790 million a year makes it the world’s 7th most used metro.
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Between 2002 and 2014, over 250 km of metro track was built and put into use across the country. This was spread amongst expansions to the Kolkata and Delhi networks, as well as the creation of two new ones: Bengaluru’s Namma Metro in 2011 and Gurgaon’s Rapid Metro in 2013. India’s financial hub, Mumbai, got its own metro in 2014. The Union government pushed on with its plans, promising financial assistance for metro systems in cities with over a million people. In 2015, plans for metros in 50 cities were approved.
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Metro was seen as the key to solving the traffic problem for a simple reason. They carry as much traffic as 24 lanes of cars while taking up very little space on the ground, meaning the size of roads doesn’t have to be sacrificed. Most Indian cities had pre-existing bus services, but they only added to the number of vehicles on the roads.
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However, it was not all plain sailing. In 2017, the Union government pulled a sharp U-turn, cutting funding unless the project’s financial load was shared with a private company. In addition, they urged state governments to only consider metros as the last option. The main reason for this was cost. Metros are awfully expensive to build, and for a developing country like India, such costs are too much to stomach.
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Nevertheless, new metro systems are still coming thick and fast. Eight cities have gotten metros since 2017, included Tie One cities of Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Pune. Six more cities are set to see their metro lines operational by 2024, with another twelve in the planning stages. Well-designed metros will relieve traffic and congestion, as well as reduce air and noise pollution. And these are things many Indian cities sorely need.
References:
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/
https://metroguideindia.blogspot.com/2020/07/india-metro-rail-network-second-oldest.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
https://www.urbantransportnews.com/article/history-of-metro-rail-in-india-trams-to-driverless-metro
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Written by Nandan Patil
Edited by Vidhi Channa
Designed By Leeyin Marbaniang