[Reader-list] 'Clean, efficient, on time. . . welcome to the new India'

[Shivam]

  Clean, efficient, on time. . . welcome to the new India

  By Edward Luce
  Financial Times (London) | 30 October 2004 
  http://news.ft.com/cms/s/27154438-2a10-11d9-b3d1-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html


India's urban landscape is littered with half-completed infrastructure
projects. But in six weeks' time, citizens of New Delhi will discover
something unusually efficient.

The Delhi Rail Metro, whose inaugural 18-stop elevated line has been
running since March, will open the city's first underground rail link
in early December. The line, which will connect Delhi University to
Kashmir Gate, will be extended to Connaught Circus, Delhi's
traditional shopping hub, and to parliament by next June. In
September, a separate 23-station underground line will be opened -
three months ahead of schedule.

The project, mostly funded with Japanese soft loans, is starting to
transform India's teeming capital. When completed, it will have 225
stations covering 245km of track. Technologically it will be a century
ahead of most of the creaking lines of the London Underground.

"We haven't done a study on the economic effects of the Delhi Metro
but they will be substantial," says E. Sreedharan, managing director
of Delhi Metro. "But already from the first line we see the effects on
people's behaviour - they queue properly, there is no spitting, and it
is a safe environment for women to travel."

The social impact is visible to anyone travelling on the elevated
line, which crosses the Jamuna river to link eastern Delhi with old
Delhi. The journey takes 36 minutes, compared with two hours in one of
Delhi's overcrowded - and often unsafe - buses.

The platforms and carriages are spotlessly clean and the trains arrive
bang on schedule every six minutes. There are no paper tickets:
passengers use smart cards or smart tokens. Occasionally the commuter
forgets this is New Delhi, so smooth is its functioning and orderly
the passengers. "There is no eve-teasing [sexual harassment] on the
Delhi Metro," says one female commuter, who now saves an hour a day in
travel time. "And there are no traffic jams. Always it is on time."

By 2009 the network will link New Delhi to Gurgaon, a booming
satellite town in the neighbouring state of Haryana, which is also a
magnet for many of India's call centres and back- office processing
units. It will also extend to Noida, another investment hub, to the
east of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The roads to both
destinations are usually snarled with traffic.

But Mr Sreedharan says the impact of the Delhi Metro extends far
beyond north India. Already feasibility studies have been conducted in
the cities of Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Mumbai, India's
commercial capital, where it would be possible to have only elevated
rail since much of the city is built on reclaimed land.

By completing each phase of the project ahead of schedule (so far),
Delhi Metro has demonstrated that large infrastructure projects can
succeed in India. The new Congress-led government has set a target to
attract $150bn (€118bn, £82bn) of foreign investment in infrastructure
in the next decade.

The Delhi Metro also shows that partnerships between the private
sector and the public sector can work. Japanese and German contractors
are involved at every stage of the $1.5bn project, although ownership
is in public hands. "We are redefining the nature of infrastructure
projects in India," says Mr Sreedharan.

The most impressive section - and the hub for Delhi's north-south and
east-west lines - will be at Connaught Circus, which will open in
June. The cavernous underground station, which will be visible from
the landscaped park above it, is already taking shape amid the masonry
and subterranean scaffolding.

Just two miles away, at New Delhi's main overground railway station,
India's traditional infrastructure still advertises its Victorian
roots. There are no smart tickets and the platforms are crowded with
hawkers, "coolies" and passengers, some waiting hours for late trains.

Although he has been invited, Laloo Prasad Yadav, India's minister for
railways, has yet to find the time to visit the Delhi Metro, according
to officials. But many are hoping that Mr Yadav, whose priorities do
not yet include the modernisation of India's rusting railways network,
the second largest in the world, will draw lessons from the Delhi
Metro.

"What we have here is a massive demonstration effect," says one
government economist. "Imagine - of all things - a modernised Indian
railways network."