[porridgeraisin]

Metro doesn't use PPP or directly public in any Indian city I can think of, they setup SPVs and actually have stable engineering and finance teams across contracts. And most of the engineers are taken from railways only in any case. And it's a really good promotion path, ministers are known to select successful metro spv administrators for lucrative roles in the state secretariat. They even have lateral movement between SPVs of different cities, e.g many top CMRL people are ex-DMRC. So the talent problem is not there.

The reason for delays are more boring: land acquisition, coordination among nhai, state pwd, railways, utilities, etc etc. But overwhelmingly land acquisition is the main bottleneck. If land acquisition fails or isn't exactly as you planned then you have to tweak the project itself which ripples delays all the way into the construction contracts, safety approvals, NOCs etc etc. After you resolve that, flyovers and roads are simultaneously being constructed in most cities since they are all expanding so you have to coordinate with that. And india from pre-independence has utilities placed under the middle of the road, as opposed to the sides of the road. Now this is not an iron clad rule (nothing is, in india) but it's generally true. This means that you also have to coordinate with utilities. And most of them were laid in the last century without any record left of where they were laid, so you can't even plan ahead you dig and you find out you've slashed a utility line. Each coordination point above is an NOC and all put together it takes time.

[thewhitetulip]

Some metros are PPP Some are by contractors

However, all are perpetually delayed

Pune metro line 3's construction status was 85+% for over 1yr now

Land acquisition was over a long time ago. Progress on road is just invisible despite being built by a private company which will operate it for the next 30yrs

[porridgeraisin]

All Indian metros without exception are managed by SPVs.

Land acquisition is not something that gets over. It is a continuous process. Then the court cases if any always show up with some delay, and that can revoke transfers. Then you have to look for alternative land parcels, which may involve minor reroutes in the worst case. It's the same with finances, everything comes in tranches, land, money, everything.

> Pune

You can see this entire documentation[1], make sure to click on the two section headers to reveal content. While no doubt the document might mislead you about the extent of the delay, and really % done means nothing in these projects where the unknowns are unknown, you can clearly see it's the exact coordination issues I had mentioned earlier: utility coordination, handling expanding flyovers/roads, etc.

> All are perpetually delayed

Because, it's not an internal organisation issue or a personnel issue (i.e "hire more engineers"). The exact organisation does not matter when the problems are of the external kind mentioned above.

Now, the problems mentioned in TFA don't occur here because the SPVs house long term employees with - for government standards - fairly robust institutional knowledge.

The top comment now has content refuting the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582433

> Look at the memes for Pune metro line 3 and for Karnataka metro (forgot which line)

The same memes exist everywhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582563

> Even though private

If you want real private efficiencies, you have to give the entire responsibility of many departments to the private company. So, a near-private whole sub-municipality. Just making the metro SPV private is meaningless, although definitely better than having it under PWD...

[1] https://www.pmrda.gov.in/en/pune-metro-line-3/maan-hinjawadi...

[thewhitetulip]

Interesting. So do they not work on the things were land acquisition is solved?

I see at least 4 stations daily where there has been literally 0 progress in the past few months.

They could finish rest of the job right? Until land issue is resolved (which don't revokve around that land like stairs etc)

[porridgeraisin]

Two possibilties, one, less likely: typically they work on the bottleneck things first and redeploy the people there.

Two: most likely, an earlier contract to construct the station (and especially for interiors like stairs, it's always a different contract) was cancelled[1] and they have decided to postpone tendering a new contractor for that station, until the nagging land issue is closer to being solved, lest the same issue happen again with the new contractor.

If you meant why can't it be decoupled, well that's because in general some entity in the chain won't give you a completion certificate trusting that you will integrate the two decoupled projects properly later. If you want to make the integration a separate step, no contractor will assume responsibility for it and sign it since the two components are done by others and it becomes a game afterwards of who takes the blame. It's also extremely low margin work. Sometimes, you will see TATA led businesses take the risk and somehow do it, out of altruism towards nation building, but I have not seen any one else do it.

In general the rule with govt contracts is that if there's any problem at all with the contract, all work even if it's unrelated physically speaking, will stop. Because it's related contractually speaking. Such is life.

[1] e.g because the timeline after delays stops being viable for him

[alephnerd]

> I see at least 4 stations daily where there has been literally 0 progress in the past few months

Where do you live? Delhi Metro has been quietly expanding rapidly over the past decade, and you can see fairly constant construction and execution. Same with the Gurgaon Metro.

If you are in Bangalore, its metro was a victim of the Siddarmiah-Shivakumar rivalry (Siddaramaiah backed Mysore and Mangalore at the expense of Bangalore to undercut Shivakumar who has significant investments in Bangalore).

> Until land issue is resolved...

This is the biggest timesink for any Indian infrastructure project. Eminent Domain is basically impossible in India under the LARR, which has constantly delayed infra projects across India.

[porridgeraisin]

In some way, it works out. Because of LARR being the way it is, the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done. While that sounds bad, overall this leads to positive infra development. Much better than the alternative of a principled politician who doesn't indulge in such corruption, but due to the inherent difficulty of LA also gets nothing done. Also considering the politicians are voted for, you also get a little bit of alignment to public interest. I.e Mr. X knows he can campaign on a sports center in the corner there without worrying about LARR on the existing old office building - his brother owns it.

Of course this is not business friendly at all... And you end up needing SEZs and special "Foo Cities" for land acquisition to even be remotely feasible for Foo companies. But hey atleast SEZs/special cities don't face the same problems.

[alephnerd]

It slows down SEZ creation as well, becuase an SEZ needs land, which forces state planning commissions to deal with the LARR headache, but at least it's state governments that are facing the headache instead of businesses.

It also prevents the development of mass dormitories for migrant workers in factories, which is the de facto model adopted across Asia.

> the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done

It works until it doesn't, as can be seen with Bangalore because of the Siddaramiah (Mysore) versus Shivakumar (Bangalore) rivalry, or Panchkula whenever Haryana got a BJP CM because former CM Hooda had significant land interests in Panchkula.

---

Eminent domain and "bulldozer raj" might be undemocratic, but it's what helped Urban China clean up in the early 2010s [0][1], when it was in similar shoes to India today. So did South Korea in the 2000s to present [2][3]; Japan in the 1980s to 2000s [4]; and Taiwan in the 1990s to 2010s [5][6].

Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.

Edit: can't reply

> From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism

Not really. The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project by building a Mandir/Masjid or naarabazing "laal salam" or "Jai bhim".

When demolitions and urban renewal projects are executed in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan the full might of the system is used to push it through. No PILs or human interest media stories slow down those demolitions and urban renewals. If they need to crack heads or break a few legs, they will.

India under Indira used to be able to execute at such frequency, but then the counter-reaction in the 1980s and 1990s led to India neutering it's eminent domain laws.

[0] - https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201...

[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk46cwSCkTs

[2] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-feb-09-fg-korea...

[3] - https://www.listentothecity.org/Resisting-Seoul-s-brutal-apa...

[4] - https://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/documents/d/toshise...

[5] - https://www.taiwantoday.tw/print/Environment/Taiwan-Review/2...

[6] - https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/05/21/...