Money, Metro?, Money....

To make Metro Rail transport system more viable and profitable, one needs to address the pressing issues concerning the connectivity and costing both to the commuters and as well as to the Operators. Effective management and cost reduction and rationalisation of both Project execution costs and operational costs is the need of the hour.

Due to dependency on government funding, there are major delays in starting the project execution and take up further expansion needs. The operators need to look at alternate sources of project funding. Infrabazaar deems that ready availability of funding, we can definitely reduce the execution costs by effective planning and timely execution.??Also, a private public partnership could lead to better focus on profitability.

Majority of the Metro connectivity in major cities are limited to specific locations, thereby restricting the commuting traffic to look for alternative modes of transport. We need to spread the connectivity to major parts of the city.?

Some of the measures to address the viability and profitability of Metro transport system are:

• Switching to Solar Power or alternate sources of power consumption by setting up dedicated Solar Power Plants for Metro transport.
• Improve alternative revenue streams / Non fare revenue Income / And advertising Income.
• Reduce Capex requirement by turning to Leasing of coaches instead of buying them. This will ensure better mapping of expenses vs revenue.
• Fund raising with public & private participation backed by government guarantee.?
• Enhanced Project funding by Banks / Financial institutions with or without Govt guarantee.
• Fund raising from IT Hubs / Corporates by providing them direct access from the metro station to their campus.
• Fund generation by providing naming rights to a station / Dedicated stations for corporates.
• Providing secondary connectivity to major spokes of the city from main metro station, this will increase the traffic flow thereby increasing the revenue.
• Providing better parking facilities for Two-Wheeler & Four-Wheeler community, to switch to Metro for longer travel distance.
• With better frequency of trains and larger coverage of areas spread across the city, commuter traffic will bound to improve thereby increasing the revenue streams.??
• With good mobility options, the quality of life is bound to improve which eventually leads to good economic progress.

Some of these innovative ideas are being implemented at some places in isolated efforts, but what is required is a serious and dedicated strategy and approach to reduce both project and operational costs by effective utilisation of both public and private fund availability.