Transport linkages

In August 2004, the Prime Minister set up a high-powered committee on infrastructure, which was supposed to cut through the tangles of inter-ministerial co-ordination and deliver an action plan. Eight months later, many people are wondering just what happened to this high-profile initiative. The mid-term appraisal of the ongoing Tenth Plan did, indeed, say several things that the government ought to be saying.

But these assessments are far from translating into a concrete set of proposals for policy and administrative change. Any hopes that the UPA government may have kindled on the infrastructure front are fast receding. This is all the more frustrating, given that most of the problems have a reasonable number of relatively non-controversial solutions.

There is, unquestionably, a great deal of resistance to and, therefore, difficulty in pushing through radical organisational change. But then, Messrs. Ahluwalia, Chidambaram, and Singh are no strangers to radical reform in the face of a crisis; the infrastructure constraints that the economy is working within are rapidly approaching crisis proportions.

While the running aground of power sector reforms tends to dominate the limelight, basic organisational and co-ordination problems hinder progress in other sectors as well. Transport is an important case in point.

Whether at the level of transport systems within a city or from a national perspective, the way in which the sector is run suffers from some obvious problems, which significantly reduce the overall productivity of the system. Take the metro rail system in Delhi, for instance. A sophisticated, hi-tech system is being rolled out more or less on schedule and is attracting more and more users.

However, its overall benefit to the city, which is the justification for the local government committing such large amounts of money to it, depends on how effectively other modes of transport adjust to the fixed network it has established.

While some bus routes are apparently being changed to ferry commuters to metro stations, the stark reality is that the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation and the Delhi Transport Corporation (which operates many of the buses plying on Delhi roads) continue to operate as independent entities.

An integrated transport authority, whose objective is to maximise the efficiency of the system as a whole, would have been a valuable institutional innovation as the metro was being set up. Unfortunately, the idea never gained any momentum.

At the national level, we have three ministries""railways, surface transport, and civil aviation""each pursuing its agenda with an apparent lack of concern for what the others are doing. If the issue is a high-speed rail freight corridor along the golden quadrilateral?

How does this impact on the economics of the national highway programme along the same quadrilateral? And if the proposal is free entry for low-cost airlines, how does this affect the railways' calculations on revenues from upper-class services, which are a cash cow for them?

None of these critical inter-linkages ever seems to get the attention it deserves. It is time the inter-dependence between different modes of transportation was given due recognition and the policy formulation and implementation processes restructured to reflect this.