Getting Delhi's rich to use public transport is easier said than done
Arvind Kejriwal wants to get the upper-middle-class using public transport. This is a great idea that poses even greater challenges. Public transport needs to offer riders comfort, convenience and reliability in order for the well-heeled to even consider using it.
This could plausibly be achieved by overcoming a number of planning, technology, funding and implementation challenges. On the supply side, Delhi will have to ensure that public transport is as convenient and comfortable as a chauffeur-driven car, given that the city’s extreme weather conditions, poorly built pavements, and other practical considerations such as pollution don’t make walking easy. No corporate CEO wants to show up for meetings covered in grime.
No bureaucrat wants to waste time chasing multiple connections to get to their destination. But the demand side poses an even bigger challenge: the city will have to shed its conditioning that use of public transport is a sign of low socio-economic status. It will have to drop its mental conditioning that deems private transport a symbol of high status, and the absence of it a disadvantage.
That would require nothing short of a mini cultural revolution. What would happen to the chain of command in a company if the CEO and the worker who runs errands both travelled by the Metro? Would the social order hold up if the hierarchy of power were not reinforced with a steady stream of status reminders? Would it be outlandish to expect the car-ensconced to worry about such existential problems when invited to ride a bus or train? A personal vehicle has never been, in the Indian imagination, a mere means of getting from A to B. It is a symbol of status, of the power differential that exists between the haves and
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