Mobility in urban India can be defined as the capability to move from one location to another influenced by the push ( i.e. outflux of people) and the pull ( i.e. influx of people) factor. The need for a better livelihood and an elevated socio-economic environment often supervises these factors of pull whereas the scarcity of basic domestic services and employment viability provide the push for the city’s inhabitants. The public transportation system often serves as the performative nerve connecting people from their houses to the areas of employment in the city and also formulates a kinetic perception of its morphology.

“ Migrants don’t come to cities looking for housing. They come in search of work. And they try to live as close as possible to their workplaces — or to some form of transport that will take them to those places. Thus affordable urban housing is not an isolated problem — it is the product of an equation that includes at least two other crucial parameters: job location and available transport. In India, very few people have access to cars—this is why public transport (trains, buses and trams) is of such crucial importance to them. It means they can get to their job, their school, their doctor, their friends. Much is made of the energy, the get-up-and-go spirit of Bombay— especially as compared to Calcutta and Delhi. But do we ever ask ourselves: how much of this is due to the greater mobility of the average citizen? After all, cities are about interaction — and the synergy that it generates. ”

A Place in the Shade: The New Landscape & Other Essays

-Charles Correa

Sites all across the city are stringed through a mode of public transport— buses, trains, metros providing access to these locations. Substantially, several of these non-co-axial strings intersect and overlap forming nodes, providing crossovers and easier transfer of goods and people. A node provides the city with an area to perform commerce thereby becoming the site for employment due to its connectivity. It also initiates the decision of residence, as people prefer to reside closer to their place of employment. This phenomenon densifies the prior due to an incrementally increasing influx of people which increases the cost of housing. As a result, people are subjected to relocate to the peripheries, offsetting the city’s boundary and limits progressively. 

This develops to be a pinwheel of issues of reconnecting the suburban and peri-urban areas to the city centre by introducing more interjecting transportation lines or drawing parallel ways for newer possibilities. Hence, it develops a heavy reliance on Mass Rapid Transportation (MRT) as an instinctive answer to these problems. Present day issues regarding mobility are often tackled by an obsessive demand on MRT, usually known as ‘metros’ in India. Numerous cities throughout the country either have operational Metro train projects or are in the process of implementing them. The existing Metro network spans 500 kilometres, and by 2047, it is projected to expand tenfold to reach a total length of 5000 kilometres. At present, India’s Metro network is the fifth-largest globally, with trains operating in cities such as Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Jaipur, Gurugram, Noida, Lucknow etc. and proposals for more than 30 cities.

Therefore, raising a few arguments: “Does the obsession with Mass-Rapid Transportation system (MRT) represent the sole remedy for addressing the connectivity and growth requirements in urban cities across India?”

Indian cities aren’t shying away from emerging as a ‘world-class city’ and its fetish to develop a sustainable rail transport system is peeping over China, Japan and the West. One surely needs to understand that Indian cities are much more diffused and polynucleated than the industrial cities of the West or Japan where the urban rail system emerged as a suitable technology to move the workers from the peripheral and suburban areas to what is called the Central Business District. This fundamental characteristic of Indian cities along with mixed land use, dense neighbourhoods and persistent low-income levels has meant that the regular trips in the cities are short-distance and frequent, and rely significantly on the economically cheaper motorised two-wheelers. The sheer passion and obsession of plugging in infrastructure make us forgetful of our city typologies (nuclei of sprawled densities rather than a monolith). Thus, it is important to carefully understand the patterns of mobility unique to the Indian context and to promote sustainable infrastructural development that takes into account this mixed fabric. 

 “In the pace of upgrading to a world-class, sustainable urban mobility system, is India missing out on the native nature of the city and what kinetically it can offer in the near future.”

– Written by Sutirtha Das Gupta, Research Fellow