Late September, I had to attend a meeting at the Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute (RGCI) in Rohini (West Delhi). Pre-Covid I used to do this trip regularly on the Delhi Metro’s Yellow Line. I would board from Sikanderpur – just a five- minutes’ walk from my home in Gurugram and, in exactly 75 minutes, I would reach the Rohini Sector 18 station from where a RGCI car would pick me up for the 10 minutes’ ride to the institute. Comfortable journey in air-conditioned comfort, bit noisy but I tackled that by removing my hearing aids; no tension about whether my driver was over speeding or jumping a red light or a traffic jam enroute; I would catch up with a lot of reading and also clean up the WhatsApp mess on my phone.
This time again, I picked up courage and – much against my wife’s advice – decided to travel on the metro after a gap of 66 months. However, long before the date of the meeting, I started thinking about what the metro had done for the Delhi NCR and more importantly ‘what if there was no metro?’ I have often heard comments like “Kya Kiya Hai Metro Ne? Dilli ka Traffic to abhi bhi nightmare hai”. So, I want to share some answers with the readers. In my column, Lasting Legacies of Modern India, in the 13 July 2024 issue of BW Businessworld also I had devoted some space to Delhi Metro – along with the ECI, Constitution of India and GST – and some friends had even laughed at the audacity of including this small infrastructural reform with the other weightier subjects. But, I have always believed that the metro had transformed the way people in the NCR move and for me imagining the region without the metro is a nightmare. As a bonus, one has also seen some improvement in the Dilliwalas’ sense of discipline and cleanliness, instilled in them when they use the metro.
Before I get down to sharing my impossible calculations – actually, more guesswork – let’s look at the mind-boggling metro network already in place. With the ‘perpetual work in progress’ that the Delhi Metro is, there are always new lines and new stations being added. Anyway, around mid-2025 the status was as follows:
• 10 colour-coded lines plus the airport line in Delhi and Rapid metro in Gurugram
• 395 km total length
• 289 stations – underground, street level and elevated
• Two gauges – broad and standard
• 336 train sets – 176 with six coaches, 138 (eight coaches) and 22 (four coaches) - excluding airport line and rapid metro; doing about 4300 trips put together. As many as 29 trains are ‘driver less’
• Geography covered – Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad and Bahadurgarh
Let me now come to my nocturnal guestimates about ‘what would happen if there was no metro in Delhi’; of course everything is based on assumptions about how many commuters will do what in a Delhi-NCR, sans metro.
• Total ridership in 2023 was two billion i.e. about 5.5 million daily
• As the ridership is always increasing, let’s assume a figure of six million for 2025-26
• Since many passengers change trains to reach their destination, I will assume a total of four million passenger trips
• Let me also assume that everyone is making a return trip, so we reduce the number of daily unique passengers to two million
• In the event of there being no metro, we need to make more assumptions about what these two million passengers would do:
• Five per cent would go back to their bicycles adding one lakh additional bicycles on the road
• 10 per cent would start using their personal scooter/mobike; two of them share the same two-wheeler (2W) and we end up with an additional one lakh motorised two-wheelers on the road. Perhaps a third of the passengers seek rides on existing ones on the move, so new 2Ws may not exceed 70,000
• 60 per cent move to public buses, each bus carries 50 and we end up having 24,000 new buses on the road. Again considering vacancies on the existing fleet, let’s take 10,000 new buses
• Five per cent resort to three-wheelers (each carrying three passengers) so we see 33,000 more of these in the city. Keeping in mind that the present lot are never fully occupied, we will settle for 10,000 new 3Ws.
• Five per cent use tempos – that carry 10 passengers each – and we have to add 10,000 tempos; again the factor of vacancies on the present ones, perhaps only 5,000 new tempos need to be added.
• Five per cent go for electric 3Ws each carrying six persons and use the same formula of present vacancies and, may be, we will manage with about 8,000 new E3Ws.
• The most affluent 10 per cent will start using their own cars, four passengers pool and we see 50,000 more cars on the NCR roads.
So, with all ultra-conservative assumptions and maximum pooling, an astonishing additional 1,53,000 motorised vehicles of all shapes and sizes and 100,000 bicycles will be seeking road space and parking slots at their homes and work places; there will be criminal addition of toxic emissions, a huge number of cases of road rage and deaths due to reckless driving, noise pollution (including that from horn-happy honking) and God knows what other ills inflicted on the citizens of the Delhi-NCR. Even with the present population of vehicles our petrol stations are invariably crowded; we will need many more of these and also more EV charging stations.
At this point, I had had enough and woke up with a jolt, perspiring profusely but delighted that the dream, nay nightmare, was over with the comforting thought that my yellow line metro is still there at Sikanderpur!
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. |
