The Silver Bullet: Why everyone loves a Metro

Why in the News

Around 200 residents of Greater Noida West tied ropes to the last Metro pillar at the Sector 71 intersection in April and pulled, in a protest organised by the Noida Extension Flat Owners Welfare Association to demand a Metro line for an area it calls underserved by public transport. Days earlier the Central government had rejected the proposal for the Noida to Greater Noida West Metro corridor. Meerut became the latest city to get a Metro in February 2026, with an interchange to the Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS), India’s first semi high speed intercity rail service. The tension the two scenes expose is that demand for a Metro is now generated by politics and property. The ridership, fares and feeder transport that would justify one are generated by city planning that has not happened.

What is the Metro Rail Policy, 2017?

1. Purpose: It sets the conditions the Union government applies before it will approve or fund a metro rail project proposed by a state.
2. Alternatives test: A state must evaluate cheaper options, including buses, bus rapid transit and trams, before committing to a metro, because metro rail is the costliest urban transport mode to build.
3. Viability emphasis: It places greater weight on the financial viability of a project than earlier practice did.
4. Appraisal method: It requires appraisal through economic and social cost benefit analysis, treating urban rail as a public project that delivers a public good.

What is a Detailed Project Report?

1. Definition: A Detailed Project Report (DPR) is the blueprint that lays out a metro project’s design, its costs, its ridership projection and its financial viability.
2. Function: It is the document the Union government appraises the proposal against, and the document later audits measure actual performance against.

How large has India’s Metro network become?

1. Fourfold growth: The network has gone from around 250 km a decade ago to more than 1,100 km across 26 megacities and Tier 2 cities, with another 900 km under construction.
2. Rate of sanction: The government is sanctioning 6 km of Metro lines every month.
3. A young network: More than three fourths of the current network was conceived, constructed and operationalised less than 10 years ago.
4. Aggregate ridership: Daily ridership across the country has crossed the 1 crore mark and is expected to exceed 1.25 crore in a year or two.
5. The capacity argument: Some Delhi Metro corridors handle more than 50,000 passengers in the peak hour in the peak direction, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs calculated in January 2024 that serving that demand by bus would need 715 buses an hour in one direction, roughly one every five seconds.

Which cities run a Metro, and how do the systems compare?

1. Kolkata, 1984: The country’s first Metro system, and the only one run by the Indian Railways.
2. Delhi, 2002: The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) now runs 416 km with an average daily ridership of about 64 lakh, the largest network in the country.
3. Bengaluru, 2011: Namma Metro runs 96 km, the second largest operating system outside the National Capital Region.
4. Meerut, 2026: The newest system runs 23 km with an average daily ridership of about 1 lakh, a figure that includes RRTS ridership at the shared station.
5. The rest of the map: Gurgaon opened in 2013, Chennai in 2015, Hyderabad, Kochi and Lucknow in 2017, Ahmedabad and Nagpur in 2019, Noida in 2019, Kanpur in 2021, Pune in 2022, Navi Mumbai in 2023, Agra in 2024, and Bhopal, Indore and Patna in 2025.

Why does every city want a Metro?

1. Density of unserved demand: The Greater Noida West association puts around 10 lakh residents and at least 80 societies in the area it says has no rapid transit.
2. A visible proof of development: Local administrations and politicians want a Metro network in their constituency to demonstrate development, in the assessment of a rail and Metro consultant and former country head of Bombardier Transportation India.
3. It has entered the manifesto: In five of the last six state elections, in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, Bihar and Delhi, at least one major party promised Metro projects, their expansion, or fare concessions.
4. Party specific claims: The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) claimed credit for bringing Metro Rail service to Chennai. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bihar promised Metro trains in Muzaffarpur, Gaya, Bhagalpur and Darbhanga.

Why does ridership fall so far short of projection?

1. The systemic gap: Most Metro systems are meeting just 25 per cent to 35 per cent of their projected ridership, in a 2023 analysis by professors at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Delhi at 47 per cent and Kolkata at 38 per cent fared relatively better.
2. Bengaluru: Namma Metro was projected to carry 18.54 lakh passengers a day by 2020-21, as recorded by the Standing Committee on Housing and Urban Affairs in a 2022 report, and carries around 10 lakh in 2026.
3. Kochi: The 28 km system should have reached 5.39 lakh daily riders by now under its DPR and averages around a lakh, with the projection since revised to 1.5 lakh a day, a target the operator hopes to meet in the next 10 months.
4. Jaipur: Average daily ridership was 51,000 in the inaugural month of June 2015 and stood at 53,000 in June 2026, and the Union Cabinet approved a second phase in April for ₹13,037 crore.
5. Nagpur: A 2022 Comptroller and Auditor General report found the New Airport station averaged 47 passengers a day over 18 months from the start of commercial operation in March 2019, against 5,474 a day envisaged in the DPR.

Why does the Metro not fit the way Indian cities actually travel?

1. Trip length mismatch: Research at the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre finds the Metro efficient only for commutes beyond 10 km. Most city commutes are shorter than 5 km, and even in Delhi only 15 per cent of trips exceed 10 km and 7 per cent exceed 20 km.
2. What the short trip costs: For a short journey a passenger has to add the time taken to reach the station, the stops en route and the last mile at the other end, which other modes avoid.
3. Alignments miss the destinations: The Ahmedabad Metro does not serve SG Highway, the commercial hub holding the city’s offices and malls, nor the university area.
4. Last mile decides the mode: A commuter with neither home nor office near a station finds public transport more expensive than a personal scooter or a hired cab.

What in the city’s own design keeps people out of the Metro?

1. Driving is not priced: Low or non existent parking charges make private vehicle use cheaper than it should be, and poor footpaths make the walk to a station unattractive.
2. Feeder networks are not built: Last mile connections and integration across modes rarely materialise once a line opens, in the assessment of a Metro consultant, so a passenger reaches the station on his own or not at all.
3. The city is not shaped to feed the line: The Mumbai Metro struggles to perform because the city was not planned in a way that channels trips into it, in the assessment of a transportation researcher at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

Why are fares high, and who does that exclude?

1. Fares follow the viability test: Metros are obliged to keep fares high mainly to make both ends meet, a consequence the first Managing Director of DMRC attributes to the emphasis the 2017 policy places on financial viability.
2. Who is priced out: High fares keep out a section of the population. That section turns to less dependable but cheaper public transport.
3. The pricing only works on some trips: A Lucknow resident finds the 23 km city Metro worth ₹70 for an airport trip against ₹400 by auto, and uses an auto or two wheeler for every daily commute.

What do other countries’ networks show about where India stands?

1. Absolute scale: India at 1,100 km is set to overtake the 1,400 km subway system of the United States, and remains far behind China’s 10,000 km network.
2. Financing and operating culture: The Delhi Metro was funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency through flexible loans. It adopted a Japanese operating ethic centred on punctuality and queue discipline, giving Indian cities a template for dignified urban transit.
3. When to start planning: The developed country model is to begin planning a Metro when a city’s population crosses 10 lakh and to have the system running by the time it reaches 20 lakh, on which basis the Metros in Patna, Jaipur, Bhopal and Lucknow are justified.
4. Networks are built over generations: Tokyo, Hong Kong and Paris were not built in a day, so a large infrastructure investment has to begin well ahead of the demand it will eventually serve.
5. Optimism is not an Indian trait: Large infrastructure projects globally overestimate initial projections and underestimate costs, and the shortfall is routinely overlooked on the ground of greater public good.

Who decides whether a city needs a Metro?

1. The decision precedes the study: The process typically begins with a state government deciding it wants a Metro, an idea that crystallises quickly and often before any formal study is done.
2. The assessor is the beneficiary: State governments create a Metro authority and then ask that same body, which stands to run the project, to assess whether the city should build a Metro at all.
3. What that produced in Jaipur: A 2017 Comptroller and Auditor General report found the city, with a population of 2.3 million, was not eligible for a metro rail project, and concluded that defective planning and hasty decision making introduced a financially unviable Metro system in Jaipur.
4. Accountability is thin: Queries to the Metro systems in Delhi, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Nagpur, Jaipur and Chennai went unanswered.

Is the Metro over built, or is it under fed?

1. For some riders it is the only option: A 21 year old hospital intern living in a central Delhi slum reaches work 17 km away in Noida in 45 minutes by Metro, against a 6 am start at a bus stop to arrive at 9 am, and returns after 9 pm because the Metro feels safe.
2. The cost of waiting is higher: It is easier and cheaper to build a Metro in a smaller city before it grows and congests, and cities that do not start now will face the situation their larger counterparts already face.
3. The objection is to the trade off, not the mode: The problem is not that governments promote the Metro but that they do so at the cost of other public transport, so a city must still depend on a reliable road based system alongside it.
4. The official defence: Ridership projections account for a city’s Master Plan and its future development potential, ridership is significantly influenced by network density and extent, and ridership on many DMRC lines has exceeded the projections made in their DPRs.

Challenges to metro rail expansion in India

1. Debt service migrates to the state budget: A corporation borrows against ridership that does not arrive, and repayment then falls on the exchequer. Eg. Kochi Metro Rail has run operating losses since 2017 and depends on continuing state support. Fix. Fund a defined share of operations from a dedicated urban transport levy on fuel and parking rather than from the farebox alone.
2. No unified metropolitan transport authority: Bus, metro, suburban rail and para transit run as separate agencies with separate fares and no common timetable. Eg. Delhi’s Metro, cluster buses and Delhi Transport Corporation services operated for years without a single ticket. Fix. Constitute statutory Unified Metropolitan Transport Authorities with fare setting and route rationalisation powers, as the National Urban Transport Policy, 2006 envisaged.
3. The land value the line creates is not captured: Property owners along a corridor capture the price rise that public investment produced. Eg. Land values near Delhi Metro corridors rose sharply with no betterment levy accruing to the operator. Fix. Levy a betterment charge along corridors and grant development rights over station land to the metro corporation.
4. Fare revision is politically blocked: Costs rise annually and fares are revised only when a government is willing to absorb the reaction. Eg. Delhi Metro fares went unrevised for years after the 2017 revision despite rising energy and staff costs. Fix. Make revision automatic through an indexed formula operated by a statutory Fare Fixation Committee.
5. Signalling and rolling stock depend on a few suppliers: Core train control technology is supplied by a small set of foreign vendors, which raises cost and lengthens delivery. Eg. Communications based train control systems on Indian metros are supplied largely by three global vendors. Fix. Use the domestic content requirement in metro procurement to qualify Indian signalling suppliers through a guaranteed order pipeline.

Conclusion

India is adding metro rail faster than it is adding the ridership, fares and feeder transport that would make the network work, because the demand being satisfied is political and territorial rather than a measured transport demand. Nothing in the record suggests the mode is wrong for the corridors that genuinely carry the volume, and the record does show that the appraisal deciding which corridors those are is conducted by the body that stands to build them. The unresolved question is whether appraisal will be separated from execution, and whether bus and road based transport will be funded alongside the Metro rather than after it.

“[2014, GS3, 12.5 marks] National Urban Transport Policy emphasises on ‘moving people’ instead of ‘moving vehicles’. Discuss critically the success of the various strategies of the Government in this regard.”