Bangalore metro: progress or white elephant?-FTimes

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Bangalore metro: progress or white elephant?

October 20, 2011

After missing four deadlines, India’s outsourcing and IT hub, Bangalore, finally inaugurated South India’s first metro on Thursday amid great fanfare.

But whether the state-of-the-art urban railway system will do anything to alleviate the city’s infamous traffic problems still remains to be seen. Equally as important is the question of India should marshal its limited resources now that it is finally beginning to invest more and more in its failing infrastructure.

“It’s a question of whether or not you’re approaching the metro as a component of your mobility plan for Bangalore,” said Partha Mukhopadhyay, senior research fellow at Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research. “Or whether, as I suspect happens in many cases, the metro is something like the Eiffel tower, where you must have it because it is the latest gizmo in town and everybody has to have it – if that’s the reason then it is basically a show piece.”

Mukhopadhyay said that if the project was integrated into the broader transportation network of the city, it could be useful. There is some movement in that direction in Bangalore – there are common day passes for the metro and bus networks – but “I’m not sure that engagement is happening very effectively yet,” he said.

Some Chinese cities, as well as Singapore, have made it more costly to use private vehicles through increased license fees and congestion charges, he said, which makes public transportation more attractive. That isn’t happening in Indian cities yet.

With Indian infrastructural spending lagging far behind its economic growth and serious infrastructural investment commencing only in 2000, Mukhopadhyay told beyondbrics that the country often looks positively on all major projects.

“We, because we’ve been starved of infrastructure in India, tend to look at most infrastructure projects relatively unquestioningly – we tend to look at all investments as good things, without asking: could we spend this money in a better way?” he said.

Originally meant to debut in March 2010, Bangalore’s Namma Metro missed three subsequent deadlines before being launched Thursday. It is intended to help alleviate Bangalore’s notorious traffic problems – IBM recently ranked the south Indian city the world’s 6th worst on its “Commuter Pain Index” – a direct result of the city’s explosive growth since it birthed the Indian IT and outsourcing industry.

The city’s population grew 46.68 per cent during the last decade – the highest growth rate of any of the country’s major cities – to nearly 9.6m, according to the 2011 Indian census. In contrast, Mumbai’s population actually shrunk by 5.75 per cent, while Delhi’s grew by 20.96 per cent and Chennai by 7.77 per cent.

The delays on the first 6.7km section of the project’s first phase added an extra $694m to the phase’s $1.64bn original price tag, according to India Today magazine.

Such delays are standard, even by international standards, Mukhopadhyay said.

“Large complex urban projects are difficult to forecast in terms of both time and budget completions,” he said. The question you need to ask is whether “the extent of the cost overrun or the time delayed is such that the original benefits from the project are completely overwhelmed or mitigated.”

The project is funded through a partnership involving a 15 per cent equity stake for both the central and state governments, 25 per cent as subordinate debt, while 45 per cent as senior term debt from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, a development organization affiliated with the Japanese government.