A K Bhattacharya: Not dogged by delays alone

The paradox pertaining to India's infrastructure sector is unlikely to have a parallel anywhere else in the world

Among the many paradoxes that trouble the Indian economy, the one pertaining to the infrastructure sector is unlikely to have a parallel anywhere else in the world. The paradox is evident at two levels. One, when a newly built infrastructure facility fails to anticipate the potential demand for its usage. And two, when the operators of a new facility wait for demand to pick up before expanding the services. In a country where capital is both scarce and costly, failure even in one of these areas can have many adverse consequences.

Take a close look at any newly built overbridge in an Indian town. In most cases, three things will strike you instantly. One, the time between the planning of the overbridge and its construction would not be less than four or five years. Two, the authorities would have allowed the use of a section of the overbridge even before the project is complete. Three, the overbridge should have been much wider and longer since the existing traffic using it would have already strained its capacity. There are exceptions, but those only underline how poorly planned most other overbridges in the country are.

 

Infrastructure projects must provide for the future. They must anticipate future demand, which the new facilities should be able to meet without any capacity constraint. Look at China. That country goes to another extreme. It is building infrastructure projects on a huge scale, keeping in view the demand that will materialise, perhaps a century later. Even the British, who built New Delhi in the 1920s, had planned the city in such a manner that its roads could withstand the demands that today’s traffic exerts on them. New Delhi’s main roads and their arterial lanes, built more than 80 years ago, are wider than most roads and lanes built after India’s Independence.

The real problem, of course, lies in the slow speed of executing infrastructure projects. There are long delays in their completion. The delay also means that the demand from users of such a facility rises to a level at which the civic authorities are forced to throw open a section of that project for use even before it is completed. That decision, ironically, removes the urgency of completing the project, since a part of the facility is already in use. Construction problems also surface in such a situation. Finally, when the project is completed, the demand for using the facility shoots up, creating congestion, overcrowding and all sorts of other inefficiencies. This is the unfortunate story of urban India and its infrastructure.

The second type of paradox is worse. Here, an infrastructure facility may be in place, but the project authorities limit the scope of its operations until such time as demand picks up. Delhi Metro is one example. Initially, after its launch in 2002, it used to terminate daily services by 10 p m. Subsequently, it extended the services schedule. But even today, it does not go beyond midnight. In the morning, no service starts before 6 a m.

For a successful and useful mass transportation system in a city, the services cannot start only at 6 a m and end by midnight. The physical infrastructure is in place. All the Delhi Metro needs to do is hire some more people and perhaps a few more coaches and locomotives to start the service a little before 6 a m and run it a little beyond midnight. Not doing this, or waiting until it sees demand for such a service, reflects a myopic vision on the part of the Delhi Metro management. From an infrastructure project point of view, this is a case of gross underutilisation of capacity already created at a huge cost.

The same problem in approach has become a bottleneck for the newly launched Delhi airport metro train service. Built at a cost of over Rs 5,800 crore, it has the capability of carrying passengers in air-conditioned coaches from New Delhi to Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in about 18 minutes at a fare that is less than half of what you would pay to a private non-air conditioned taxi operator. Yet, it carries about 8,000 passengers daily, only a fifth of the total 40,000 passengers who transit through that airport.

Who is responsible for this gross underutilisation of a passenger facility created for those entering or exiting the city by air? Ignore the fact that there was a delay of at least five months in the opening of the Delhi airport metro project. However, once it became operational, there was no logic in running it only for 16 hours a day and that too between 6 a m and 10 p m. The timing of its operation was such that thousands of air travellers taking the early morning flights and returning to the city by the late evening flights could not use the Delhi airport metro service.

The explanation that the operators would extend the running time of the service once passenger demand picks up does not hold water. Infrastructure services cannot wait for demand to pick up before expanding their network. The important lesson that the operators of these infrastructure services should learn from all such facilities across the world is that they are the trigger for a pick-up in demand. And that can happen only when they extend the services to utilise the full capacity created for the infrastructure facility. Not doing that would be ironic in a country where capital is scarce and infrastructure needs a big push.