On May 10, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a public rally in Hyderabad. Use the metro, he said. Carpool. Shift goods to rail. Work from home. Reduce petrol and diesel consumption. The appeal was framed as a response to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, which has sent global oil prices surging and India’s import bill spiraling. Crude and petroleum products cost the country $174.9 billion in 2025-26, nearly a quarter of the total imports. The logic is correct: India’s dependence on imported fossil fuels is structurally dangerous and its reduction deserves to be attended.
But the PM did not answer one question: if citizens must use public transport, where exactly is it?
The instruction to use the metro lands differently when one lives in one of the thousands of cities where there is no metro. What about those who live in Chennai, where the bus fleet has shrunk over the last few years even as daily ridership climbed to 3.33 million passengers? Against a current demand for 1,30,000 buses across 127 Indian cities, only 46,000 buses provide formal services and 82% of even that inadequate number operate in megacities alone. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ own recommendation of 40 to 60 buses per 1,00,000 people is a standard that most Indian cities have never come close to meeting.
In 2022, when fuel prices spiked globally, citizens were asked to manage. Now, with the West Asia conflict compressing margins further, citizens are asked to manage again. But this time, they are also asked to use infrastructure that the state has systematically underfunded for two decades.
Between 2011 and 2024, the share of urban households owning a motor vehicle surged from 40% to 68%, a near doubling in just 13 years. This did not happen because Indians suddenly fell in love with cars. It happened because the bus became unreliable, uncomfortable, infrequent, and in many cities simply absent. Two-wheelers and three-wheelers filled the gap because nothing else did. The state created the conditions for private vehicle dependence and is now appealing to citizens to undo it through individual moral choice.
Who Already Uses Public Transport?
The working poor of Indian cities — the construction labourers, domestic workers, street vendors, informal factory hands — who constitute most of the urban workforce already use public transport. They use it because they have no choice. Hang out in the sun, travel in overcrowded buses and for them, metro fares are beyond their means.
The private vehicle user, to whom the PM has appealed, belongs to the middle and upper-middle class. And that class will not shift to public transport through appeals alone. It will shift only when public transport offers comparable comfort, frequency, reliability and safety. That requires investment, not instruction. It requires planning, not appeals and at the same time, making privately driven cars an uncomfortable choice through selective pricing.
Several states have, in recent years, experimented with free or subsidised bus rides, primarily for women. Delhi’s Pink Ticket scheme, Karnataka’s Shakti, Tamil Nadu’s zero-fare programme, Telangana’s Maha Laxmi Scheme – these are genuine steps and their results have been striking. Karnataka’s Shakti scheme saw a 47% surge in women passengers within its inaugural month. Delhi’s scheme drew over 40 million women passengers in its first nine days. These experiments prove, conclusively, that when public transport is made affordable and accessible, people use it.
The demand must go further: free or near-free universal public transport as an urban right, funded not from welfare allocations but from the same consolidated funds that currently subsidise roads, flyovers, and urban expressways that serve the private vehicle – and therefore, disproportionately, the middle class and above.
The 74th Constitutional Amendment, passed in 1992, promised decentralised urban governance. It listed urban transport among the functions to be transferred to urban local bodies. More than three decades later, that transfer has not happened in any meaningful sense. Urban transport is managed by state departments, state transport corporations, and increasingly special purpose vehicles that bypass elected local governments entirely. The city corporation, the institution closest to the citizen, has no power over the bus route, no control over the fleet, no authority to set fares.
The result is a governance vacuum. Cities cannot plan integrated transport networks because they do not control the components. They cannot raise dedicated revenues for transport because the fiscal architecture excludes them. They cannot hold transport agencies accountable because those agencies report to state governments, not to city councils. The three Fs that were promised – functions, functionaries and finances – remain concentrated at higher levels of government and urban transport pays the price.
When Modi says, “use the metro," he is instructing citizens to use infrastructure managed by joint Central-state SPVs that have bypassed elected city governments since their inception. The Smart Cities Mission followed the same logic: bypass the ULB, create a parallel delivery structure, call it efficiency. The efficiency may sometimes appear in the ribbon-cutting photograph. It rarely appears in the last-mile bus route that a worker needs to reach the metro station.
What genuine policy looks like
The West Asia crisis, for all its human cost, has opened a window for an honest conversation about Indian cities and fuel dependence. That conversation should not be wasted on appeals and optics. It should be used to force a structural reckoning.
A genuine public transport policy for Indian cities would, first, immediately scale up the bus fleet, the most cost-effective and spatially flexible form of urban mass transit. Buses carry up to nine times as many passengers as metro systems in cities that have both, yet metro corridors receive the glamour and the capital. Second, it would devolve transport planning and finance to urban local bodies, giving cities the constitutional authority the 74th Amendment promised but never delivered. Third, it would move toward universally accessible, low-fare or free public transport funded from a dedicated urban transport fund, built from a portion of fuel taxes and road cess that currently disappear into consolidated accounts. Fourth, in hill cities and ecologically sensitive regions, Shimla, Mussoorie, Darjeeling, Gangtok, where the topography makes private vehicle dependence both logistically dangerous and ecologically catastrophic, emergency measures to restrict private vehicles and build alternative mobility systems must be the immediate priority.
The PM is not wrong to worry about India’s fuel import bill. He is wrong to address that worry through individual moral appeals while leaving the structural failure of Indian urban transport untouched. Citizens cannot use what does not exist. They cannot walk to a metro that their city doesn’t have. They cannot wait for a bus that never comes.
Build the public transport first. Make it free, or nearly so. Devolve the power to plan it to the cities. Then, and only then, will the appeal to use it have any meaning beyond the optics of a rally in Hyderabad.
