Ensconced in your car behind a hundred-odd vehicles, sometimes
for as long as half-an-hour, even as buses zip by intermittently on
the two-thirds of the road reserved for them, one would, on the face
of it, have the right to feel peeved. After all, you pay taxes and
are probably forking out a costly EMI to fund your mode of
transport.
It seems unfair, especially in Delhi if one includes the
frustration of living in a city that resembles one recovering from a
bombing reminiscent of what Germany inflicted on Britain during the
World War.
Not really, if you know some basic facts of road transport in
Delhi. A survey by RITES (Rail India Technical and Economic
Services) of Delhi in 2008 showed that 13.92% people used cars. On
the other hand, 14.72% used cycles/cycle rickshaws and a staggering
34.67% simply walked—they don’t own any transport, can’t afford
public transport and hence simply walk!
So while about one in three people in Delhi walk, a little over
one in 10 use cars to commute. The transport corridor does not
reflect this reality, though. Pavements are continuously shrunk for
expanding roads, in turn to accommodate the burgeoning vehicle
population in cities.
The same RITES survey found that 40% of the roads do not have a
sidewalk. Clearly, going by democratic rules that govern India, this
is patently unfair. And yet, this element of the political economy
of road transport in a metro such as Delhi is often ignored. Not
surprisingly, most of the media reporting on the BRT (Bus Rapid
Transit) experiment in Delhi, minus these facts, skewed the debate
against the project from the very beginning.
It is my case that this information was suppressed. The
authorities must surely have been aware of the RITES survey, but
never employed it to educate what was always a rhetorical debate
over the introduction of a BRT.
The bad handling and half-baked execution of the project only
compounded the problem, as it were.
And this can’t be passed off as the usual incompetence that we
have become used to with respect to the execution of public
projects.The big question, then, is why so? One is not privy to the
inner goings-on of the deliberations among the political powers; yet
one can hazard a safe guess.
The logic will lead to the second aspect of the political economy
of road transport in a metro. It lies in the cost difference between
projects. A BRT as opposed to a metro rail or the addition of scores
of flyovers do not simply compare. The current stretch of BRT must
have cost less than Rs1,000 crore—a trifling compared to what is
being invested in attempts to shape up the city (it is another
matter that this is unlikely to materialize) ahead of the
Commonwealth Games in October. The builder-developer-politician
nexus knows this very well—and this is not just something exclusive
to India (some of you would have read about the road-to-nowhere in
Alaska).
To put it very bluntly, the opportunity to skim the pickings in a
BRT kind of project is limited. So it is not surprising that it
comes low in the order of priorities in any discussion on public
transportation. This is rather strange for two reasons.
Firstly, since the BRT kind of projects, given their relatively
lower cost, have an inherently more robust underlying revenue model.
And secondly, given that most users of public transport,
particularly in India, are from the relatively lesser well-off
demography—a key constituent—it is rather surprising that the
politicians have not factored this into their response; maybe the
fact that an election is not due for another three-and-a-half years
in Delhi could offer a clue.
Going forward, it is time the politicians and public policy
experts revisited the debate on public transport in India. If urban
areas are going to house 2/3rds of the country’s population, then
public transport is a key element without which we will be heading
for a disaster. And it has to be something that acknowledges both
India’s scale and the fact that it has users who can barely afford
public transport, implying that copying what works in New York won’t
do.
Anil Padmanabhan is a deputy managing editor
of Mint and writes every week on the intersection
of politics and economics. Comments are welcome at
capital...@livemint.com
