As we travel across India on business trips, we see airports and metro train networks in small cities. While the airports are welcome, they often seem to carry little traffic. Similarly, most of the metro trains we see in the smaller cities are empty and we ask our other colleagues in Marcellus whether cities like Jaipur, Cochin and Nagpur really need metros given the amount of taxpayers’ money such infra projects tend to soak up. Nikhil Inamdar’s article answers some of our questions. He writes:
“Since 2014, the Narendra Modi government has splashed out more than $26bn on building metro connectivity across nearly two dozen Indian cities.
The network has grown fourfold from under 300km to more than 1,000km by 2025. Average daily ridership has also almost quadrupled from three million to more than 11 million people in the last decade.
But these grand aggregate numbers mask worrying underlying data.
Most metro systems in India have failed to achieve even a sliver of the ridership projected during their planning stages, according to experts.
An Indian Institute of Technology Delhi report from 2023 showed ridership of merely 25-35% of the projected figures across corridors. And these numbers are unlikely to have significantly changed over 2024 and 2025, one of the study’s authors told the BBC.
Other studies corroborate these findings.
According to the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) think tank, ridership in some tier-3 cities such as Kanpur in the north was as low as 2% of the projected estimate, while in the southern city of Chennai it was 37% for the first phase.
Data shared with the BBC by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) also revealed actual ridership of between 20-50% in cities such as Pune and Nagpur in western India.
The capital Delhi, which has India’s widest metro network, is perhaps the only exception where usage has slightly surpassed projections.
However two transport experts – Aditya Rane of the ITDP and Ashish Verma of the Sustainable Transportation Lab at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru – told the BBC that this is because Delhi has begun to count interchanges as separate trips.”
So why do India’s metros have so few passengers? Part of the reason is what we suspected i.e. the metros are being built in cities which simply don’t have high levels of commuter traffic. Another part of the reason is high ticket prices. Even in prosperous south Mumbai – a neighbourhood packed with hundreds of $ billionaires – the ticketing executives in charge of the Aqua Line told the BBC that high ticket prices are deterring commuters from using the line.
However, another reason for these empty metro trains is faulty demand forecasting. Mr Inamdar writes: “…Ashish Verma of the Sustainable Transportation Lab at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru – told the BBC that… consultants often inaccurately projecting potential demand, says Verma.
“It is a complex task [to project demand], and figures are sometimes exaggerated to show the project is economically viable,” he said.
He added that forecasts were often made based on “offered capacity” on the trains – such as a certain number of coaches, or frequency times for trains. In many cases these have never been realised.
For instance, in Bengaluru, peak-hour train frequency on the busiest line is five minutes or more, while on a newer line, it goes up to 25 minutes.
Similarly, the number of coaches on many trains is only between three and six, whereas the busiest metro rail systems in the world typically operate with nine coaches and a frequency of a train every minute-and-a-half, according to the Sustainable Transportation Lab.”
As tax collection growth in India slows down, the powers that be in India will have to make some tough decisions regarding infrastructure spending in the years to come.
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