Do the people matter?

The chief minister’s dream of workers and employers travelling together is unlikely to be realised.

Most of the comments on my last column on the Metro Bus System (MBS) focused on the behaviour of the travelling public.

The overcrowding, failure to queue up, the misuse of facilities, and the littering were blamed on the lack of civic sense. Some even suggested training and awareness programmes before letting the public enter the area. What should be done? Redesign our people?

The MBS was billed as a project for the people. A large sum of public money has been spent for the sake of the ordinary people.

I am not getting into the debate on cost, as there is no reliable information to judge between the official and nonofficial claims ranging wildly between Rs 30-70 billion.

Here, one has to wait for the revised budget. Nor will I go into the question of whether some alternatives would have made better economic sense.

I am not even questioning the distorted concept of mass transit implied in the MBS. Even the decision to act at the fag end of the government can be defended.

Spending such a large sum on a single project before the new National Finance Commission Award would have been impossible. The size of Punjab’s development budget in 2010-11 was Rs 107 billion. In the current year, it is Rs 250 billion.



My problem is that people never figured in the planning and execution of the project. It is built on the assumption that our people do not deserve better. They are used to overcrowding. So, be it. Otherwise, the service would have been started with an adequate number of buses. Rules would have been framed, and courteously enforced, about the number of passengers to be accommodated in a bus. By banning all other public transport on the route, overcrowding was only to be expected. Some junglas could also be added to encourage queues.

Affordability is the most important consideration in public transport. But it is wrong to assume that the people do not want to pay for good service. Over six per cent of monthly consumption expenditure of an urban household in Punjab is on transport. For the distance covered by the Metro, the ordinary buses charged around Rs80. Public transport involves some subsidy everywhere. In Ahmedabad, India, the bus rapid transit has actually been able to balance revenues and expenditures. However, keeping the fare as low as Rs20 per person is an incentive for overcrowding. It also means that a service started in the name of the people will either close down sooner than later, or the purpose is eventually to restrict it to the middle classes. The chief minister’s dream that the Metro will witness workers and employers travelling together echoed what the mayor of Bogota famously said: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” This dream is unlikely to be realised in our lifetime at least. What is, however, not impossible is to put in place systems to enable the poor to get to their workplace in dignity. Not necessarily a seat for all, but a standing space at least. Construction of the MBS was the easy part. There was money available and it was spent rapidly. Managing it in the interest of the people is where the real action lies. In a similar situation, a landmark judgment of the Delhi High Court brought out the class structure of the Indian society, where the rich and the powerful claim a divine right over public resources. Transport infrastructure, the court ruled, is for moving people, not vehicles.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2013.