'For many Indian cities, metro rail has become a fashion statement'

As the man behind the world’s largest elevated metro rail project in public-private partnership mode, NVS Reddy, managing director, Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited, tells TOI that Indian cities should avoid fashionable metros in small cities: Many Indian cities are opting for metro rail projects. Is metro rail the answer? Metro is not the only solution but has become a fashion statement – every city wants it. Unfortunately, even very small cities are opting for it. Jaipur, Nagpur, Kochi have metro with hardly 20,000 passengers per day. In UP, six cities are building metros. But metro rail is basically meant only for cities with over 50 lakh population where there is no other option. No metro project in the world is financially viable. There are about 250 rail-based mass rapid transit systems in the world but they all need to be heavily subsidised. Only 50% of the revenues come from passenger fare and the rest from property exploitation and advertising. The few financially successful metros in the world are Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Taipei but they were also initially built as government metros and then handed over to the private sector for efficiency purposes after the governments wrote off a lot of capital expenditure. Many Indian cities going for metro rail today will realise later that even with a soft loan of 2%, once you start repaying the debt after 5-10 years, the governments will be burdened. Even a project like the Delhi metro is facing a problem as they don’t have the money to repay. medium95103923 What is the ideal solution for Indian cities? Elevated Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) is the best solution for Indian cities. Roads have a particular hierarchy that is followed the world over, but in India there are a lot of issues such as encroachments, bottlenecks, junctions, road width and traffic discipline. In Delhi also at-grade (road level) BRTS has proven to be a failure. The elevated BRTS is just like a dedicated metro without any conflicts at junctions. It is also cost effective. While at-grade BRTS will cost about Rs 20-25 crore per km, elevated BRTS will cost Rs 110 crore per km. On the other hand, elevated metro rail will cost around Rs 300 crore per km like in Hyderabad and underground metro like Mumbai will cost anywhere between Rs 600 crore to Rs 1,000 crore per km. What about monorail? Monorail is not a mass transit system, it can at best be a feeder service. Monorail’s advantage is that it is elevated and you can take it in very narrow gullies and have very sharp curvatures unlike the metro where curvature and gradient are the biggest limitations. Today most Indian cities are grappling with traffic snarls and gridlocks. How do we tide over this nightmare? Cities all over the world went through the same stages of traffic congestion. They all started with short-term and medium-term solutions like junction improvements, road widening, flyovers, and learnt the hard way that public transportation is the only solution. All of us are paying a heavy price for living in cities. Globally, even many backward countries have reached 60% urbanisation while developed countries are at 80% and 90% urbanisation. In India though we are still at 35% urbanisation, because of the sheer numbers it’s rising rapidly. Today, the distance is not measured in terms of kilometres but the time it takes to reach a place. Also, we are at initial levels of prosperity with vehicle ownership only at around 10 out of every 1,000. Yet things have reached such a head. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before life comes to a halt in Indian cities. We are sitting on a powder keg. Public transportation is the only solution with some restrictions on private vehicles. How can private vehicles be restricted? Globally, road space is the most expensive commodity with about $10 per hour being the minimum parking charges, whereas in India people misuse road space with encroachments and parking even on sidewalks. Nowhere in the world is this allowed. While London follows the principle of congestion pricing, which means during peak hours you cannot take your vehicle to the main city centre and if you do you have to pay extra, Singapore conducts auctions of car licences every year that are at times costlier than the car itself. Some other cities follow the odd and even rule which means you need to own two cars. All these are to discourage private vehicles and encourage public transportation. How is the Hyderabad metro project unique? It is the world’s largest elevated metro rail project to be built in public-private partnership mode at 69 kms in phase-1. When I mooted the project to then chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh, YS Rajasekhara Reddy, he told me to come up with an innovative solution as he could not give us that kind of money. I studied successful models globally and realised that their revenues come from sources other than passenger fares which is what we adopted here. We planned for about 50% of metro revenues to come from passenger fares, 45% from property development and 5% from advertisements and other miscellaneous things. We opted for elevated metro, which is much more cost effective and fuel efficient than underground metro where it is not just the construction costs but also operation and maintenance costs that are very high. The project required 269 acres of land for three depots and about 20 select stations. As it was not possible to acquire land at all stations as land is expensive, we opted for an innovation that allows L&T to commercially exploit 30% of the land at depots by restricting the depot size. For stations, we went for an engineering innovation.