Suburban train: Wanted yesterday

Every day, nearly 10 lakh people wake up and head to work in one of those mega office parks along the Outer Ring Road between Silk Board and K.R. Puram. This part of our city is the primary reason why Bengaluru is consistently ranked as one of the most dynamic cities in the world. It attracts talent from all over the world and, more importantly, for this column, commuters from all over the city.

Commuters who huff and puff their way to their workplace, stressed and cursing the traffic gods. They don’t have a life before or after work thanks to the long commute.

In the past ten years, millions of square footage of office space, lakhs of apartments and thousands of hotels and restaurants have sprung up out of thin air. 

And yet, during the same time our government has failed miserably in providing mobility to a million people literally driving the economy of this city and country. There is no Metro, no train, while there are 6-8 “signal free” lanes which do absolutely nothing to the lakhs of cars or hundreds of buses all stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours.

The suburban train is a long-cherished dream of Bengaluru. Unlike Mumbai, Chennai or even Hyderabad, Bengaluru never leveraged the existing extensive railway lines (180 km) and stations (60) as an effective mass public transport system. While commuters are stuck on the Outer Ring Road, the railway stations along the same road, Bellandur Road and Carmelaram wear a deserted look, waiting for the state and central governments to resolve their differences and make good use of them!

Two high-voltage public campaigns, #ChukuBukuBeku in 2016 and #ModaluTrainBeku in 2018, helped put enormous pressure on all political parties, and things seemed to be finally progressing in the right direction with budgets allocated, cabinet approvals granted and numerous announcements made by politicians, until we just heard of yet another road block.

Apparently, the state government has put up a list of 19 conditions to the Railways. Some of them look petty and others genuine, but none of them look like showstoppers. If there is common understanding of the fact that Bengaluru cannot afford to lose one more day on this precious project and strong political will is needed, these objections can be resolved amicably in due course while getting started on the work immediately.

As a definite measure of building public confidence that both the Railways and state government are committed, we demand that additional train services be run to serve the ORR route from city stations within the next three months. We have already submitted to the chief secretary and Railways officials a list of short-term measures that can be taken to increase train ridership that will ease traffic congestion.

Benglureans are probably the most tolerant and patient people, but even their tolerance has a limit and they will get back to streets and stations if that’s what it takes to get the trains moving. Victor Hugo famously said “No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come”. No force on earth can stop the suburban train in Bengaluru as its time has come.

The “time for train” came yesterday.

(The author is Co-founder, Citizens for Bengaluru)