New Delhi’s expanding Metro system is changing lifestyles and living patterns in the nation’s capital in a variety of ways, some perhaps not even anticipated. It is not clear if the Metro’s planners anticipated the fact that spending an evening on New Delhi’s Boat Club lawns, the green expanse stretching from the Parliament House and the Central Secretariat at one end of Rajpath to India Gate at the other end, would become attractive and affordable to lakhs of Dilliwallahs holed up in little boxes in Delhi’s far-flung colonies. The ease with which people can commute has not only made the Boat Club lawns an attractive venue for family outings but also an easy place to mobilise crowds for whatever cause, as all the candle light gatherings testify to.
Professionals, traders and workers working in the Connaught Place area now have no problem moving home to distant colonies in West, East and North Delhi, not to mention Dwarka beyond the airport, because they can commute easily by train. Getting a house close to the Metro is the next best thing to getting a house close to Lutyens’ Delhi. Executives living in Noida, across the river Yamuna, now commute by Metro to New Delhi’s new airport, not just because it is more convenient but also because you can actually measure the time it would take. Given the growing pressure of traffic in urban India, mass rapid transport is an increasingly welcome option. That is why, despite the initial negative response to Delhi’s bus rapid transport (BRT) system, with private vehicle owners protesting at the usurpation of road space, such protests have died down as more commuters discover the benefits of rapid transportation. (This is not to say that the BRT system cannot be tweaked to ensure more efficient and economical use of road space.)
Mumbai’s and Kolkata’s commuters, who have long benefitted from urban public transport systems, do not need the kind of convincing that citizens of other Indian cities still seem to need. Chennai began to put in place a metro system but its coverage is still limited. Bangalore has had many teething problems and Hyderabadis are still not convinced. Both Mumbai and Kolkata, however, need rapid modernisation of their rapid transport systems.
Urban public transport systems are the only answer both to growing traffic congestion and rising price of energy. India cannot continue to subsidise diesel and kerosene in the manner it has been doing for far too long. However, levying market-determined prices for energy must go hand in hand with improved public transport systems. With the singular exception of the United States, most modern economies have efficient public transport systems. From Japan to Britain, China to Singapore and Paris to Moscow, public transport offers citizens both an affordable and an efficient means of transportation. India has long neglected its urban public transport system. India’s urban administrators have been content to allow more buses to ply on roads, as if this was the solution. Buses on the same crowded roads do not improve efficiency of transportation, even if they make commuting affordable. Given, on the other hand, the limits placed on a BRT system, due to lack of space, the better option is a metro rail system. An ordinary bus system also does not change lifestyles and living options as much as a rapid transport system does.
