Projects don’t fail. People do
The much hyped Metro Bus service of Lahore is facing its first trial by fire in the intense heat of the Lahore summer. There are reports of buses overheating and being taken out of service because the air conditioning system could not deal with the climactic conditions. Then there are complains of people who have to travel several kilometers just to get to the other side of the road. And even when they do get to the distant U turning, they find themselves in a traffic jam that sometimes takes awfully long to disentangle. The Metro bus service is a useful service to commuters and the ticket price of Rs20 is reasonable. But on the other hand, the Punjab government has to subsidize this hugely expensive project to the tune of Rs one billion per month, money that could have found better use in restoring other social services.
In order to put things in perspective, one only has to look a few hundred miles east, to the city of Delhi, where, about ten years ago, the Delhi Metro Rail was started. Built under the supervision of a visionary ex Indian railways bureaucrat Sreedharan, the Delhi Metro has raised the bar for public transportation in South Asia, if not the world. It has some of the cheapest fares anywhere, ranging from Rs8 to about Rs20, yet it earns a profit of Rs20 million a month
The network consists of six lines with a total length of 189.63 kilometres (117.83 mi) with 142stations, of which 35 are underground, five are at-grade, and the remaining are elevated. All stations have escalators, elevators, and tactile tiles to guide the visually impaired from station entrances to platforms. The DMRC operates around 2,700 trips daily between 06:00 and 23:00 running with an interval of 2 minutes with 40 trains. The capital cost of Phases I and II has been estimated to be US$2.6 billion/Rs260 billion Pak Rupees or Pak Rs1.36 billion per kilometer. This compares with the Pak Rs30 billion cost of Metro Bus along with another Rs40 billion or so for civil infrastructure. The cost of the 25 km long Lahore Metro comes to about PakRs2.8 billion per km. The Lahore Metro Bus service is said to have a capacity of 100,000 passengers per day while the Delhi Metro carries two million passengers per day in air conditioned luxury to 143 stations on six lines.
The Delhi Metro is a masterpiece of efficiency; 99.97 per cent of trains arrive within one minute of schedule. They are clean, cool and safe. At peak hour, they come every 2½ minutes. It runs at a profit. The best part of the Delhi Metro is that it is able to earn operational profits despite having one of the lowest fare levels in the world. When all four phases of the Delhi Metro project get executed it would have a total length of 420 km and become the fourth largest metro project in the world.
The advantages of a metro train service are therefore self evident. It is more efficient, will last longer, carry more passengers much faster and in more comfort. It will also be environmentally friendly as is evidenced by research that has found that the level of CO in the area around ITO, a busy intersection in Delhi, has fallen by at least 35 per cent.
The most commonly quoted negative factor of the discontinued Lahore Metro train had been its cost. As stated above, the construction cost per kilometer of the Delhi Metro is Pak Rs1.38 billion per kilometer while the cost of the Lahore Metro Bus varies between the official figure of Rs1.2 billion per kilometer to a mindboggling Rs2.8 billion per km if the civil works of flyovers etc is added. Also, because the Metro rail is heavily automated, fewer staff would be required, meaning lower operating costs. There would also be profits from shops and shopping arcades as well as advertising in the Metro rail stations.
Perhaps the biggest inconvenience that the Metro bus has dealt to the populace of Lahore is the deterioration in the quality of life for people living in the footprint of the bus service: the inconvenience of traveling miles just to cross the road to the other side and more than anything else, the sheer disturbance of a way of life for the common man. All this could have been avoided had the Metro Bus project been properly researched and a kneejerk reaction not been taken to ditch the Metro rail project out of hand.
A better option might have been that the Lahore Metro Rail project could have been reworked, with assistance from the people who built the Delhi Metro or some other consultants who had helped start the Delhi project. With proper management controls, the costs would have stayed at Delhi Metro levels and Lahore could have had a Metro Rail that would have been the pride of the city. Instead, we have a loss making monolith that is a severe drain on the resources of the city, resources that could have been utilized much better in the social, health or education sector. One billion a month is not small change.
Ultimately, the success of the Delhi Metro is due to the management skills of a career bureaucrat, whose motto and that of the entire Metro organization is to do something for the greater good. And it is in management that we Pakistanis fail. We make projects with suspect motives without really going into the depth of the matter. Then all the bureaucrats and politicians start elbowing for space and lucre and before we know it, the broken shell of the project is all that remains. Projects don’t fail. People fail. When will we learn?