Hiccups derail India's Metro expansion

Close to 350km of Metro lines were added across India in the last five years. However, there are already complaints of suboptimal services

- Soumya Chatterjee

India’s Metro rail systems are meant to transform urban travel, replacing endless traffic jams with punctual, predictable journeys, but the travel experience in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata is getting compromised by too few trains and too many passengers.

Starting with the Kolkata Metro in 1984 in the hope of living up to the global success stories of the New York Subway and the London Tube, India now has 1,000km of operational metro lines, making it the third largest network at a country level, after China and the United States. Close to 350km of lines were added in the last five years. However, there are already complaints of suboptimal services.

Take Bengaluru’s new Yellow Line, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month. This stretch, which connects Electronic City to the central business district, runs at a peak frequency of 25 minutes. In fact, the civil works were ready by September 2024, but operations could not start due to a lack of trains. This abysmally long wait between two services is due to a shortage of train sets.

A BMRCL spokesperson said that a five-minute headway can be reached earliest in March 2026. Even in the other two lines — Purple and Green, train sets are fewer than one train per kilometre of network length, an informal standard referred to by sectoral practitioners.

In contrast, the Delhi Metro operates with a headway of less than two minutes on all key stretches during peak hours, which makes it comparable with services in cities in developed countries.

Unfortunately, this mismatch between infrastructure potential and operational delivery is not unique to Bengaluru. In Mumbai, Metro Line 1 — the city’s only east-west mass transit corridor — was designed to run six-car trains, but operates with four-car rakes even as ridership has grown and overcrowding has become a daily feature with a headway of 200 seconds during rush hour.