How Delhi's free ride plan may kill a national transport integration goal

Prospects of complete privatisation of commuting in Delhi and nearby areas is a bad enough scare; the larger issue is the killing of a plan to integrate public transport systems across the country

More buses stand on the roads at Delhi's borders with Noida and Ghaziabad throughout the day, than at the nearby designated bus stations such as Anand Vihar or Sarai Kale Khan to pick up passengers. Near Dhaula Kuan, on the other side of Delhi, private buses bound for Rajasthan cram into a small plot just below the metro station, ringed with makeshift food shops and smelly pee points. These buses have become the lifeline for migrants to Delhi, who form 16.4 per cent of its total population as per census figures, since the state-run services are almost absent. Free rides for women is not on the menu for any one of these operators, who offer highly competitive rates that sometimes vary depending on the seasons and even  the time of the day. 

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s plan to give women a free ticket on government-run buses threatens to privatise public transport entirely, without offering any benefit to the public or the government from the switchover. Only these privately-run, unregulated buses will benefit as the finances of the government take a hit. These buses play the cat-and-mouse game daily with the Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and sometimes with Rajasthan government transport departments, evading challans and finding new spots to pick passengers. In one drive in a fortnight in April, the Noida authorities issued challans to 165 such vehicles and issued FIRs against 27 operators. Incidentally these bus operators have no plans to make their services free for women. While their market reach will expand, plans to make responsible private sector entities run efficient bus services have just not taken off. 

Instead the choice for the commuters is between the owners of these one or two bus fleet or the highly inefficient government-run services in most towns of India. The Association of State Transport Undertakings, which includes 62 government-run bus operators across the country, notes that these service providers offer just 150,000 buses on a daily basis, to cater to 70 million passengers. Of these, the Central Institute of Road Transport (CIRT) estimates only 86 per cent are on the road at any given time. The fleet strength of the metros along with those of Ahmedabad, Pune and Nagpur adds up to just about 25,000. The reasons why they break down is obvious. The median age for these buses is above five years, according to CIRT.  

Yet, despite those numbers, India’s bus manufacturers rarely depend on government undertakings to meet their annual sales target. Bus sales have begun to revive in India and most of the offtake is by these private operators or by schools and companies that seek to augment their fleets. In FY19, bus sales rose to about 10 per cent after years of de-growth, clocking about 90,000 units. Of these, only about a third came from the state transport undertakings. In FY17, these undertakings bought 12,074 buses but scrapped about 11,116. So the rate of addition to the total government run fleet annually, is peanuts. The total number of government-run buses and cluster fleets in Delhi and surrounding areas is less than 6,000. 

As a result, labourers commuting through these towns face a harrowing time getting to Delhi for jobs daily. The private buses, while cheaper than the scanty services of DTC or Noida transport authorities, have no fixed schedule. They are crowded and have no regularity on the connecting roads of these towns with Delhi. Fares are not the challenge, availability is. 

It is this lack of availability that has made a non-starter of the common mobility card, introduced in 2018, for metro services and buses in Delhi. Many of the buses are not equipped to handle the swipe. As a result, revenue growth has been almost nil during the past ten years. The state government’s figure for DTC shows average fleet utilisation has dipped from a targeted 87 per cent to 84.63 per cent in FY19. Next door, UP has done a bit better with a compounded annual growth rate, net of inflation, at four per cent in the same period. Again, CIRT data shows capital investment in all state government run bus companies declined from Rs 50,915.41 crore in FY16 to Rs 46,950.06 crore in FY17, as soon as the stimulus provided by the erstwhile JNNURM stopped. It has just begun to climb back to the level of FY15. Of the total revenue from tickets for the bus services, almost 14 per cent is eaten away by subsidies to various classes of passengers. Plans to make the bus ride free for women would put these companies in the red and compel people to rely even more heavily on private services. 

It is true that the central government and multilateral institutions do not want the cities to run bus services. “Rolling stock (buses) should not be part of the working plans of the municipal corporations,” Rajeev Gauba, then secretary of the ministry of urban development in government of India, had said in a chat with Business Standard a few years ago. 

The ministry has, instead, asked the city bosses to build core infrastructure to run city transport services, which will include a regulatory system for setting tariffs, an IT-based tracking system for buses and building of adequate bus shelters. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is yet to get a whole lot of those systems in place but risks handing over the daily commute to companies. There are other risks too. 

State-run bus companies across India are desperately scouting for means to raise revenues as annual conferences at the Association State Road Transport Undertakings show. The states want to adopt the National Common Mobility Card model at the earliest. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the first venture under this model at Ahmedabad in March this year. To be steered by the National Payments Corporation of India, the indigenously-developed payment platform will enable a single card for seamless travel through different metros and other transport systems in the country. The cards will be issued by banks and there are plans to extend the payments system to not just bus and suburban railways but also for payment of toll, for shopping or for parking. Making rides for women free risks keeping them away from the entire ecosystem of these benefits and freedom.