The End of ‘Traffic Hell’
In India’s silicon capital, college students, retired government employees, housewives and tech-industry workers thronged the stations to ride the just-launched metro train service on Thursday. It was a raucous opening, with musicians beating on drums, security guards whistling and, in keeping with tradition on Indian roads, the drivers of the new trains honking incessantly. “This is a dream come true,” said Pranjal Dixit, 21, an engineering student who had traveled from the other end of the city with five classmates to ride the sleek green-and-purple colored coach of the train on the train’s elevated first stretch.
A local transport company helper, S. Murugesh, brought his son Abhishek Kannan, 2, to ‘witness history’, he said. “How fast can it go?” wondered a retired government official, Sudheer Rao, as passengers’ cries of “Metro ki jai!” (“Victory to the Metro!”) rent the air. At each stop, pink shirt-clad station controllers stood by to keep rule-breaking passengers from running across the tracks. Customer relations managers patiently answered questions on how to buy a ticket (costing 10 to15 rupees or 20 to 30 cents) and where to board.
Bangalore is India’s fastest-growing city, and the main India outpost for dozens of international companies including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and Thomson Reuters. They, and India’s homegrown IT giants, employ tens of thousands of software engineers, research scientists and customer service workers in the city and its suburbs. So far, the service runs along a mere 4-mile stretch from downtown MG Road to Byappanahalli in the east and has only six stops. But that did not quell the excitement of Bangalore’s harried commuters, who look at the much-delayed project as their savior.