The Magenta Line, the latest addition to the National Capital’s sprawling metro rail network, was inaugurated on 25 December. The Delhi Metro has been credited with bringing about significant improvement in traffic congestion, reducing the number of accidents, reducing pollution, and saving commuters’ time. Will other cities follow suit?
The first metro service commenced operations in Kolkata in 1984, years after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid its foundation stone. Over the last 33 years, a rail network of 370-km has been established in nine cities. The latest additions to India’s ever-expanding metro rail network include metros in Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Kochi, not to mention the Delhi metro.
When Will My City Get a Metro?
Around 537 km of metro tracks are under currently under construction, according to an August 2017 article in the Times of India. Commuters in cities including Pune, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Vijayawada, Kozhikode and Indore have been promised metro rail soon.
According to the Times of India, a total of nine cities – including Delhi, Noida, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Kochi, Bengaluru and Chennai – are set to get additional 313 km of metro rail connectivity by March 2019.
Who is Paying For These Metros?
The capital-intensive metro rail projects in India are generally funded by the Public-Private Partnership model.
The model involves the Centre offering assistance of up to 20 percent of a project's costs, while equity and subordinate debt accounts for 14 percent and 6 percent respectively, Times of India reports.
A senior urban ministry official told Livemint: “the success of Delhi-NCR metro brought enthusiasm in the state governments and they want to replicate the same in the cities with population of over 1 million. We are getting a lot of proposals and many of the state governments are also looking at public-private partnership (PPP) since urban transportation is a state subject.”
"To speed up Metro expansion in view of growing traffic and pollution, the central government has increased budgetary provision for Metro projects to Rs 42,696 crore during 2015-18, marking an increase of 258 percent over that of Rs 16,565 crore during the 2012-15 period,” a housing urban affairs ministry official told TOI in August this year.
Please Mind the Gap
Each new metro line or phase appears to be taking leaps on the technological front, with the Delhi metro Magenta line featuring hi-tech signalling and the Hyderabad line – scheduled to open in 2018 – promising features like e-vehicles, bus bays and other end-to-end connectivity.
However, the ambitious plan has run into many a hurdle. Livemint reported that the current fiscal year saw the ministry allocate around 17,960 crores for metro rail companies. Till the first quarter ending in June, only Rs 4,650 crore was spent by states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Delhi-NCR region.
Despite states being ready for the PPP route, officials from Punjab and Madhya Pradesh, complained about delay in approval of metro projects from the Centre, the Livemint report added. With the growing concentration of the population in urban areas being blamed for increasing traffic woes and pollution, these obstacles standing in the way of a well-defined and effective nationwide metro network need to be ironed out – and soon.
(With inputs from Livemint, Times of India, Deccan Chronicle)
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