'Delhi can't do without a metro'

Q&A: E Sreedharan

With the Delhi government readying for introducing a Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS), Sunil Jain spoke to Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Managing Director E Sreedharan on the comparison between a BRTS and a metro, on the metro slipping behind its targets, and its expansion plans. Excerpts:

The Phase II targets are steep. You did 65 km in seven years in Phase I, now you'll do 117 km in 3.5 years.

Yes, nowhere in world has such a target been set, but we can do it. We had three chief project managers for Phase I, we'll have seven for Phase II. The problem we're anticipating is getting rolling stock "" we need 400 coaches and have told foreign firms they have to make around 80 locally. For the 19.5 km airport stretch, we'll do only the civil works, the rest will be done by private firms on a turnkey basis.

Your losses in 2004-05 were Rs 76 crore. What's the figure for 2005-06?

We've got a profit of Rs 85 crore after depreciation and interest. PBDIT is Rs 347 crore in 2005-06 as compared to Rs 20 crore in 2004-05. Farebox collections have risen from Rs 54 crore to Rs 113 crore. The 2005-06 numbers, of course, look better due to extra front-ended property development income of Rs 296 crore (property development income in 2004-05 was Rs 6 crore).

On an apples-to-apples basis?

We'll be minus after depreciation and interest. We've never said the metro will make profit, but we've said we will not require any subsidy, we'll make all repayments and interest out of our earnings. Only four of 135 metros in the world make operational profits and we're one of them "" no one can provide for depreciation charges.

Phase I costs have more or less doubled from the original Rs 5,500-odd crore.

The initial Phase I cost was at the April 1996 cost and was confined to 55.3 km only. Phase I today covers 65 km and includes the latest technology such as the Automatic Fare Collection system, extra escalators for public convenience and modern trains. Taking into account inflation, the Phase I cost of Rs 10,571 crore was within the estimates.

You're way behind on your ridership. The metro was originally supposed to carry 21.8 lakh passengers a day by 2005. Today, your website talks of 15 lakh in 2005 and the actual achievement is around 5 lakh.

The original estimates were prepared by RITES, not by us. It assumed new colonies coming up, land use changes which never happened (this would have increased density), it assumed every station would have high density feeder buses so that passengers would enjoy better connectivity. RITES assumed bus fares would go up, so ours could go up as well. We assumed our fares would be 1.5 times that of bus fares, but today bus fares are around a fourth of ours in spite of losses being incurred by them which are covered through subsidies. The DMRC, on the other hand, runs without subsidies.

Still, you're behind your own 15 lakh target for the year 2005.

The RITES report prepared in November 2001 on the impact of feeder bus services on the Delhi Metro estimated 15 lakh ridership for Phase I but also said that this would be reduced to a third if a dedicated, complete and professional feeder network for the metro was not provided. At present we are carrying 4.75 lakh passengers which is thus according to estimates.

What is the new target?

This 15 lakh target was for the Phase I section of 65 km in 2011, not 2005 (following the interview, the DMRC site reflects these new numbers). The total Phase I and II ridership by 2011 will be 26 lakh.

Professor Dinesh Mohan of IIT Delhi says you cater to just 4-5 per cent of Delhi's ridership, and this means an annual subsidy of around Rs 35,000 per passenger!

You can't calculate the ridership or subsidy while the network is incomplete. We are around 4 per cent of Delhi's ridership today; by the end of Phase II, we'll have about 10 per cent of the ridership; and by the end of Phase IV, when we're 350 km long, we'll get 25-30 per cent of the city's ridership. This is the normal ridership for most metros. A third of commuters in any place may be pedestrians and so you should leave them out.

But extending the metro to 350 km will hugely add to costs. Phase II alone will cost Rs 18,000 crore. The BRTS Mohan talks of costs a 10th the metro does and can carry as many passengers ...

Those figures don't reflect the true costs. It doesn't take into account the costs of the road "" the BRTS will take up two lanes in the middle of the road, so at some point, existing roads will have to be widened. The metro, by contrast, doesn't take up the road since it is largely underground. Where we are elevated, we're on columns in the central median and hardly take up any part of the road "" in just two places have we taken 300 metres of the road for the ramp. Take all this into account, and the BRTS costs will go up several times. In any case, the BRTS has done well in cities where a provision was made for it before a city was built as putting it in place after a city has come up is completely different. The BRTS will require even operational subsidy which the metro doesn't require.

It is not possible to run buses with less than 30 seconds in between them (though the actual will be around 2-3 minutes), so you can run a maximum of 120 buses an hour, or 12,000 persons per hour. Our capacity is 90,000 persons per hour. The real issue is whether Delhi can survive without a metro, not its profits or losses.

We've carried 230 million passengers since we began without a single fatality. The energy efficiency of a metro is also much higher (about five times more than a road-based system). Once you take pollution and accident levels coming down due to it and the time saved due to traffic snarls coming down, the metro has an economic return of 24 per cent, that is, it recovers its full cost in four and a half years.