Barun Roy: Subway network: the Beijing way

ASIA FILE

If it's true, as news reports suggest, that West Bengal has decided not to proceed for now with the idea of an east-west subway line for Kolkata because of its likely cost (over Rs 6,000 crore), then one must say Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee hasn't been thoughtful enough.

Projects like this are no longer funded by government money alone. Doesn't he know that PPP, or public-private partnership, is an increasingly popular infrastructure funding mechanism the world over, and shouldn't he have explored it fully before giving up?

In any such project, the first consideration is the need, not the cost. Is the project needed in the best public interest? In Kolkata's case, it undeniably is. The city's existing single north-south line, built and run by the Indian Railways, is a parody of a subway, because a subway is no good unless it's a network.

Besides, Kolkata's vast expansion to its east, where a whole new township, Rajarhat, is being built for more than a million people, makes it absolutely essential that an east-west link be built before things get worse.

Can flyovers and elevated railways do the job, as Bhattacharjee and his colleagues seem to believe? Hardly. Kolkata is so unplanned, narrow, and congested that unless the city can be recast as Beijing has been, demolishing even old buildings where necessary, surface intervention will never be effective.

In fact, it will be disastrous. Even Beijing, with all its imposing flyovers and ring roads and a semi-circular overhead light railway, hasn't stopped expanding its subway network. By 2008, the Olympic Year, it will have 200 km of underground railway crisscrossing the city.

Four new subway lines are to be built in Beijing for a total estimated cost of $6 billion and, for Bhattacharjee's information, all of them are to be funded through the PPP mechanism.

The public partners (various government agencies) are to foot 70 per cent of the bill and the private sector the remaining 30 per cent. But the government's 70 per cent share, and I want to emphasise this, won't have to come straight out of its own coffers.

The involved government agencies can take bank loans, issue corporate bonds, and tap foreign government or institutional funds, and these options can be exercised at the same time, not one at the cost of the other.

Accordingly, a PPP agreement has just been signed with Hong Kong's MTR Corporation for the construction of Line 4 of the Beijing Metro, the first time non-mainland private investment is being involved for a major Beijing infrastructure project.

While the public partners, Beijing Infrastructure Investment Co. and Beijing Capital Group, will have to provide $1.3 billion for the project, MTR will be investing about $560 million. In return, it will be given a 30-year operational right on the line.

The responsibilities are clearly divided. The public partners will take care of land acquisition and civil works, including tunnel construction and track laying. MTR will buy and install all electromechanical equipment and everything else.

In addition, it will operate advertising and commercial facilities along the subway line. All revenues from tickets, advertising, and commercial rentals will accrue to it.

It's easy to surmise Bhattacharjee's problem with a PPP-based subway: fares can't be kept at charity levels, as the Leftists would like them to be. But he must realise that he has no choice. Kolkata's road space is too limited, cluttered, and obstructed to accommodate any number of buses and cars.

The city must exploit its underground space and build a credible network of subways, besides using palliatives such as flyovers, to avoid being strangled by its traffic. By refusing to confront the problem squarely, Bhattacharjee is only throwing Kolkata's future into greater jeopardy.

Among all the Asian cities of its size, Kolkata has done the least for urban mass transport. It has stuck to buses, which is the easiest thing to do. Twenty-one years after it went into operation, its metro hasn't grown beyond a single 16.5 km line.

An extension has been years in the making. In half that time, Seoul built 160 km of new lines to take its network to 200 km Shanghai's first subway line opened in 1995, and it already has 78 km of tracks.

Hong Kong and Singapore haven't stopped adding to their already extensive networks. Even Bangkok's one-year-old metro (21 km) is longer than Kolkata's, and further expansions are planned even though the city also has 23 km of overhead light railways.

By 2010, Guangzhou in southern China will have about 255 km of subways. By 2020, Ho Chi Minh City hopes to have 195 km.

And Bhattaharjee and his planners, like a bunch of kids doing school projects, are still playing with flyovers, though none of the ones they have built so far has made any real difference to Kolkata's ever worsening road traffic.