India has about 1.5 billion people who live in distributed areas across large cities, urban centers, and semi-urban and rural areas, with a rising trend of people’s migration to urban areas. According to a World Bank study, more than 70% of the existing population in the country in the coming year will be migrating to and living in the country’s urban areas, including tiered metros and emerging cities near the urban centers, in anticipation of better facilities and standard of living.
With shrinking land in urban areas, governments in sub-regions and at the federal levels have been focused on building better connectivity between urban centers and those around it within the remit of 200-250 km by providing automated public transport facilities to people to enable them to travel at reasonable pricing. India has made considerable progress over the years. It has been making steady progress in providing low-cost transport systems to its people through state-owned, privately run, and owned operations through bus services.
As of fiscal year 2022, about 2.1 million buses in India were owned by the public and private sectors. The private sector has more buses than the public sector. State Transport Undertakings (STUs) own and operate public buses in the public sector.STUs focus on affordability by regulating fares and increasing reach, whereas private sector buses include stage carriage buses, contract carriage buses, school buses, and staff transportation buses. Private buses have grown rapidly in recent decades.
The bus sector has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.27%. The national target is to get to 40% e-buses by 2030. As a matter of trends, in the bus services segment, sleeper services are preferred on routes longer than 400 km, whereas semi-sleeper services are preferred on routes in the 300-400 km category. Seater services typically operate on routes shorter than 300 km.
On average, per km fare can range between INR 299 (public bus transport) to INR 3500 (private bus transport), covering a distance of 530 km, taking 8 hours to reach the destination. Road networks in India are well developed now, providing good connectivity between places, especially between sub-regional capitals and the federal capital of Delhi. A good part of 25% of the buses are e-buses, and another 25 buses running on petrol (not diesel) also cut emissions by many passengers traveling together with e-buses and buses running on petrol operating ferrying passengers. One such bus accommodates some 100 passengers on their trip through sleeper mode as they operate overnight services.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has launched the PM-eBus Sewa scheme to deploy electric buses in cities with a population of over 300,000. India aims to reduce emissions from road transport by 25% to 50% below 2020 levels by 2050. Government bodies are collecting data on travel behavior, energy consumption, and emissions from the transport sector and taking steps to reduce emissions by using technology, e-buses, and manufacturing light and better-bodied buses that save fuel.
As regards the trains, India runs over 13000 passenger trains, carrying about 7 billion passengers (about 30 million passengers per day) and covering more than 7000 stations across India on long-distance travel. In short and medium-term distances, India introduced about 25 years back the concept of metro rail that serves the local population at a low cost at a very nominal price (ranging from INR 8 to INR 50 for a distance between 3 km to 50 km). These air-conditioned trains run on electricity, offering timely services between 6 a. and noon, matching timing, speed, and efficiency at par with any such network anywhere in the world.
As a preferred choice of local transport services by all, these services are now expanded all over the country to cover sub-regions so that people can stay at a distance from urban centers but can travel to work for services and facilities to nearby towns and capitals in their sub-regions. These metro services are now cutting emissions and getting carbon credits.
India will also trial-run hydrogen trains in a few weeks, beginning with shorter travel distances and then scaling up to trains with medium and long travel distances.
This Post was submitted by Climate Scorecard India Country Manager Pooran Chandra Pandey.