Pune Metro proposal faulty: Parisar

City-based NGO Parisar Urban Transport Group has questioned the decision-making process behind the approval of Pune’s metro rail project by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC). It has also raised issues regarding the authenticity of the secondary data that formed the skeleton of the proposal.

Parisar has drawn the conclusion based on its two recent studies on the project, which points out many shortcomings in the proposal accepted by the civic body.

The first study was a preliminary analysis of whether Pune needs a metro rail system. The second study analysed in detail the decision-making processes in approving Pune’s metro rail proposal as well as the detailed project report (DPR) of the metro rail prepared by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC).

Parisar programme director, Ashok Sreenivas, said it took three months to complete the study.

An IIT Bombay alumnus with a doctorate in computer science, Sreenivas worked as a scientist for over 15 years, before moving to the social sector. Currently, he works for Parisar and Prayas Energy Group on conceptualising and executing programs for sustainable transport in Pune and across the country.

“Parisar believes that the current proposal must be rejected, and any proposal for a system such as a metro must only be approved after a thorough analysis of its benefits and costs. Until then, the PMC must focus on faster and cheaper solutions such as improving the Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd (PMPML) and conditions for pedestrians and cyclists,” he said.

The preliminary analysis of metro rail was based on secondary data from three reports: the DPR prepared by DMRC, the city’s comprehensive mobility plan (CMP) and the traffic demand analysis for Pune’s DPR prepared by Mott McDonald.

It looked only at traffic volume data from these reports to see whether a metro rail was justified on any corridor based on a simple metric of peak hour traffic demand exceeding 20,000 in one direction.

The Parisar study states that though data from these reports suggest that a metro rail may be justified for Pune, the data itself was questionable. For example, one report states that Ganeshkhind Road already carries more than 40,000 people per direction in the peak hour, which it says is not possible.
Further, it states that it is necessary to first conduct a detailed review of the data in the three reports and improve it before any conclusion can be reached whether Pune needs a metro rail.

“The DMRC commissioned a 2008 report from IIT Bombay to project ridership along potential metro rail corridors. To do this, the institute used a ‘stated preference survey’ asking citizens for their preferred mode of public transport from among various alternatives. Therefore, the ridership figures were estimated from a deeply flawed consumer survey,” said the study.

The second Parisar study that used data obtained by the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, to reconstruct the timeline of various events that led to the approval of metro rail proposal finds that some ad hoc decisions have been made.

One of it is granting a conditional extension to the Vanaz-Ramwadi corridor to Kharadi and the airport without any studies to back it up. The PMC has made some misleading statements in this regard, such as claiming that the metro was justified by the CMP, though the metro DPR was commissioned before the CMP.