Visuals and Text by Karan Deep Singh
By the early 2000s, the need for public transit in India’s cities was becoming dire. The capital, New Delhi, already massive and sprawling, was choked with traffic congestion and air pollution. But when the Delhi Metro opened in 2002, there were few successful examples of public transit systems in countries at India’s level of development.
Today, the Delhi Metro is a global model. In March, the completion of a new line made Delhi’s subway system longer than New York City’s, for a total cost of roughly $10 billion — less than New York spent to build a 3.5-mile tunnel.
“It proved that a complex urban rail project in a low- and middle-income country can be delivered and operated to very high standards,” said Gerald Ollivier, the World Bank’s lead transport specialist for India.
The Delhi Metro is the world’s first railway project to be awarded carbon credits by the United Nations. The system is 33 percent solar-powered, and its train cars capture brake energy in batteries. Last year, the trains ran 99.9 percent on time.
The First Tracks
Initially, transportation experts were skeptical of rail-based mass transit in India. In Kolkata, the country’s first metro project was mired in costly delays and low ridership since opening in 1984.
Delhi is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The subway had to snake through packed residential areas, busy markets, slums and some of India’s most iconic and ancient monuments.
Unlike London, New York and Tokyo, where subways have developed alongside city infrastructure for a century or more, the Delhi Metro was constructed from scratch in an already-bustling city.
Thousands lost homes and settlements during construction, especially lower-income and historically marginalized residents. The metro was required under law to provide compensation and alternative housing to those affected.
The managing director of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (D.M.R.C.) at the time, E. Sreedharan, took responsibility for the accidents and sent his resignation letter to Sheila Dikshit, then the chief minister of Delhi. She refused to accept it.
Mr. Sreedharan, called the “Metro Man of India,” had earned a reputation for being a fearless leader with zero tolerance for corruption or political interference. He instilled a culture of professionalism, punctuality and discipline at the company, which is jointly owned by the Delhi government and India’s federal government.
Instead of only hiring foreign consultants, he sent his deputies to study the best subway systems in the world and to bring the knowledge back to India. He hired contractors with experience with government agencies in relocating infrastructure. By the time he retired in 2011, the system had come to be widely perceived as a success.
The Metro hired drama troupes to organize street plays explaining the basics of the metro system. Commuters needed to be oriented to new concepts like navigating escalators and elevators, passing through automated turnstiles and paying for a fare for each ride.
In the early years, commuters hoarded tokens, so the DMRC introduced souvenirs to manage pilferage. Then came paper tickets, preloaded smart cards and eventually digital fares.
Now, stations host not only toilets, but also restaurants, police booths and kiosks selling clothes. Glow signs and color-coded stickers on station floors guide commuters to different lines and landmarks.
The early onboarding of passengers translated into record adoption, and continued investment in new lines has sustained ridership.
In a sweltering, chaotic city, passenger comfort and safety go hand in hand. The Delhi Metro has been a game changer for working women, who rely on its safety and predictability to go to work in and around the city, studies show.
Coaches are fitted with security cameras. Marshals prevent men from entering coaches reserved exclusively for women.
Though heavily subsidized, the metro remains too expensive for some residents. “The metro is the most efficient and easy way of traveling, but I would like it to be more cost-efficient,” says Janvi Jhamb, a 22-year-old student at the University of Delhi. August 2025 brought the first fare hike in eight years, with increases ranging from one to five rupees (roughly a penny to five cents), to cover maintenance and infrastructure costs.
Success at home has led to global opportunity for the D.M.R.C. The company is consulting for metro projects in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Jakarta, Indonesia, and bidding on projects in Bahrain and Vietnam, as well as on a 303-kilometer railway link between the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
The impact on India has been transformational. The D.M.R.C. is involved in almost every metro project in the country.
“Every full Delhi Metro train is hundreds of ignition keys that were never turned that morning,” Mr. Ollivier, the World Bank specialist, said.
Nowhere is the Delhi Metro’s technological leap more apparent than inside a spherical room where dozens of staffers remotely control the system’s driverless trains, which currently operate on two lines.
“Like we switch on a tube light in our homes, we can charge or shut down power lines from here,” said Siddharth Yadav, an operation control manager, pointing to a large wall with video screens inside the company’s Operation Control Center in New Delhi.
Public transport in Delhi otherwise continues to lag. Experts describe a lack of planning and communication between the metro and agencies that run bus systems and build the city’s roads.
The DMRC knows “how to construct the system and run it very well, but their whole thinking is that buses are competing with them,” said Geetam Tiwari, an emeritus professor of transportation at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
To serve residents who can’t afford the metro or travel to areas outside its reach, experts say, Delhi must make its bus system more efficient and integrated.
“We continue to expand our metro network, but along the way we forgot about our bus-based system,” Deepty Jain, an assistant professor of transportation at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, said.
But the metro has set a high bar of efficiency and professionalism for future public transit projects to clear, Ms. Jain said.
Compared with other subway systems, “we are still young in terms of time,” Anuj Dayal, the principal executive director and chief of communications at DMRC, said. “In every other way, we are in the big league.”
