Urban rail transit in India
Urban rail transit in India plays an important role in intracity transportation in the major cities which are highly populated.
According to a report published in 2021, a total of 2.63 billion people traveled annually in metro systems across India's fifteen major cities, placing the country as one of the busiest urban rapid transit hubs in the world in terms of commuters.
As of 2025, the cumulative length of 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) of seventeen metro systems in India makes it the third longest in operation in the world.
Indian cities have various types of urban transit systems operational, under construction and planned.
The first passenger train was flagged off from Bori Bunder (present-day Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai) from where it travelled to Thane, covering a distance of 34 km in an hour and fifteen minutes.
Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, and helped local population to meet their intracity transportation needs.
These services were discontinued in all Indian cities between 1933 and 1964, except for Kolkata where they operate on streets to the present day as heritage.
[4] In September 1919, during a session of the Imperial Legislative Council at Shimla, a committee was set up by W. E. Crum that recommended a metro line for Kolkata.
[5] The next proposal for a metro system was mooted by government of West Bengal in 1949-50 and a survey was conducted by French experts.
It was twenty three years later when the foundation stone was laid in Kolkata in 1972 to commence the construction of the ambitious metro system.
[7][8] The first concept of an urban rapid transit system in Delhi came out during 1969,[9] when a traffic and travel characteristics study was conducted.
The bus systems which catered the public transportation in the city soon began to run out of capacity and the traffic was on the rise, this soon became a growing concern.
[16] A traditional light rail system soon emerged as the efficient mode but with cheaper cost and greater capacity than what monorail offered.
As a result, many Indian cities replaced their monorail projects with either a regular metro or a light rail system.
[17] There are currently 17 operational rapid transit (Officially and popularly known as 'Metro') systems in seventeen cities across India, with Delhi Metro being the largest.
[22] In 2006, the National Urban Transport Policy had proposed the construction of a metro rail system in every city with a population of at least 20 lakh (2 million) people.
[1] Later on 11 August 2014, Union Government had announced that it would provide financial assistance for the implementation of a metro rail system to all Indian cities having a population of more than 1 million.
[29] In August 2017, the Union Government announced that it would not provide financial assistance to the new metro rail project unless some sort of private partnership is involved.
109 km (NER) Under construction Proposed Regional Rapid Transit systems in India are higher-speed passenger rail services that operate beyond the limits of urban areas, and either connect similarly sized cities, or metropolitan cities and surrounding towns/cities, outside at the outer rim of a suburban belt.
Approved Proposed 91 km (57 mi)[170] In addition to trains, trams were introduced in many cities in the late 19th century, though almost all of these were phased out.
