Every working day at 7.30 a.m., Deblina Gangopadhyay, a 27-year-old Ph.D. scholar and teaching assistant at a law university in Kolkata, would take a local train from the Konnagar railway station near her home in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. She would deboard at Bally station and embark on a tedious bus ride from outside the railway station all the way near her workplace at Salt Lake.
“It took me nearly two hours, sometimes more, to get to work that way. Now I simply take a train to Howrah and then a metro from there to reach my workplace,” she says.
Since August 22, after the Esplanade-Sealdah stretch of the East-West metro corridor became operational, her commute time for the 40-km distance between her home and workplace has come down to a little over an hour each way.
“My whole family has been waiting for years for this metro service on the Esplanade-Sealdah stretch to be operational. I also feel much more at ease knowing I will be safer inside a metro, and that I can use it at peak hours and at night, unlike buses which sometimes become sparse without warning,” Gangopadhyay says. She adds that while the bus ride cost her ₹40 one way, the metro rides cost her just ₹19.
As Deblina weaves her way through the Howrah train station into the attached Howrah metro station through peak office-hour crowds, she recognises other daily passengers from her earlier modes of commute. “I see so many people who used to take the same bus from Bally to Salt Lake as me, AC50,” she says.
On August 22, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated three metro links in Kolkata, covering 13.6 km, taking the total track length to 74 km. These included the much-awaited complete East-West corridor (Green Line) from Howrah Maidan to Salt Lake Sector V, Noapara to Jai Hind (airport) on the Yellow Line, and the Beleghata to Hemanta Mukhopadhyay stretch on the Orange Line. The Central government spent around ₹4,000 crore on the project.
The first Monday after its inauguration Deblina’s daily Green Line commute witnessed a surge of almost 83,000 passengers. On weekdays, it has been averaging nearly 1.8 lakh passengers a day.
By connecting two of West Bengal’s biggest railway stations, Howrah and Sealdah (both of which see footfalls of millions) as well as the business districts across Howrah, central Kolkata, and Salt Lake, the East-West Green Line of Kolkata Metro has changed the design of public commute in Kolkata.
Crowds surge
Now, there has been a surge of about 1 lakh passengers across all metro lines since the first Monday after the inauguration. By Friday, August 29, the Kolkata Metro carried over 7 lakh passengers on each weekday. The North-South corridor (Blue Line), the oldest line that was started in 1984, saw a surge of about 70,000 passengers on August 25.
P. Uday Kumar Reddy, the General Manager (GM) of Metro Railways, Kolkata, who is retiring by the end of August, is relieved that the last leg of the Green Line was finished under his watch.
Sitting in his office on the 13th floor of the Metro Rail Bhawan on Jawahar Lal Nehru Road near Park Street Metro station, the GM reminisces about the challenges he faced in connecting the Esplanade and Sealdah station. Visible from his expansive office windows are the city’s iconic green meadows, Maidan, and the Vidyasagar Setu, connecting Kolkata and Howrah over the Hooghly river.
Surging footfall across multiple corridors of the Kolkata Metro has affected passenger experience since the inauguration of three different metro links.
| Photo Credit:
DEBASISH BHADURI
Reddy says that a connection between the twin cities of Howrah and Kolkata was the first line ever thought of, roughly around 1919. In 1949, when Dr B.C. Roy was the Chief Minister of West Bengal, he says, experts had come to Kolkata from Paris and designed both the East-West line and the North-South line.
However, while the North-South line was made operational by 1984, the East-West corridor was shelved till it became partially operational in 2024. A part of that line goes under the Hooghly river.
“Even though a portion of the East-West line passes through under-river tunnels, the more challenging part was the 2.5 km stretch which was left between Esplanade and Sealdah. That was what we were most focussed on. It took us two and half years to complete it,” Reddy says.
In 2019, while the underground tunnel connecting Esplanade and Sealdah stations was being constructed, the land overground caved in, leading to the displacement of hundreds of residents of Durga Pithuri Lane, at the bustling Bowbazar area of central Kolkata.
“One tunnel was incomplete, the second tunnel got deformed under the pressure of the surroundings. Both tunnels had to be repaired, and we have to redo the houses,” Reddy says.
Boon and bane
On August 22, when the PM was flagging off new metro connections in Kolkata, around 100 residents of Durga Pithuri Lane staged an agitation 15 km away, banging utensils and demanding their homes be rebuilt and returned to them.
“All of us have been relocated to different parts of the city. We have been reeling under the pain of displacement for the last six years. When will we get our homes back? A total of 40 people have passed away in this time and their last breath wasn’t in the comfort of their own homes,” says a protesting resident.
Another problem is that commuters on the old North-South metro (Blue line) are facing several issues along the route due to the sudden and sharp increase in the passenger load.
“There has been a delay in the metro of about 15 to 20 minutes during peak office hours, at a time when commuters are increasing by the minute. The crowding on the station is unimaginable nowadays. When one metro finally arrives after 20 minutes, people are fighting just to be able to get into the metro compartments,” says 24-year-old marketing professional Shreeja Basu, who commutes to and from work using the line.
She adds that when she does somehow manage to get into the compartment, she can barely see the floor or breathe easy. “Half of the time the air-conditioning in the metros is not working. Imagine what that is like for people who feel claustrophobic,” she says. Basu adds that often, escalators at the stations do not work.
The older Blue line and the recent Green line connect at Esplanade station. Located adjacent to New Market, a popular shopping destination especially ahead of Durga Puja, Esplanade metro station has reported an unprecedented spike in crowds especially at rush hour. Commuters complain about the lack of staff to ease out these bottlenecks. Some even raise safety concerns as fire alarms are triggered during peak hours and there is no staff to guide passengers to safety.
The GM dismisses these as “teething issues” and “nothing that cannot be addressed”. He says the Railways know how to handle crowds. “Last year, without the three new metro connections, we carried about 9 lakh people in a single day during Durga Puja,” he says. The Metro Railway official says that earlier the Metro Rail was running on six rakes (coaches), now they have eight.
“If required, we will put in more rakes. There is a total of 14 rakes that are available. We are also working on transitioning to Automatic Train Operation (auto driving mode) in our metros from the Automatic Train Protection (manual driving mode). Things will improve; it is only a matter of time,” Reddy says.
Additionally, the terminal station of the Blue line, Kavi Subhash (New Garia), has become non-operational after July 28, when cracks were flagged in the station structure. That led to chaos and uncertainty among those who regularly commute to and from New Garia by metro, especially patients and their families who travel to the private hospitals located in the area. Trains are also being short-terminated in preceding stations, and officials say it will take about nine months to restart operations. They add that Kavi Subhas station was built in 2010, but cracks started appearing in 2014. Heavy rains accelerated the cracks.
Impact in the influence zone
According to the research and advocacy non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Kolkata is constrained by a lack of road space with less than 10% of the cityscape under roads, in comparison to New Delhi’s 21%.
“Kolkata is a dense and compact city with a huge land constraint. While that makes public transport more accessible and travel distances shorter, we need to build on that. The modernisation and expansion of a multimodal public transport system is therefore very important, especially with new metro links,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, CSE’s executive director of research and advocacy.
She highlights the importance of the influence zone, the area in a 400-500-metre radius of a metro station. “As new infrastructure is introduced, we will see a shift in the mass transport system and its design and implementation. Overall development of the para transit ecosystem, especially in the influence zone, is critical,” she says, suggesting that all public transport be integrated.
However, since August 22, private bus and yellow taxi owners have been worried. “Each bus route has suffered a loss of about ₹2,500 a day. Passengers have dropped by 100 to 150 a day since the metros opened. We do not know if we will be able to sustain our businesses like this,” says Tito Saha, general secretary of the City Suburban Bus Service, one of the biggest forums for private bus owners in and around Kolkata. He feels the government should have taken steps in advance to prevent this crisis.
The new metro links have affected the city’s iconic yellow taxi drivers.
| Photo Credit:
DEBASISH BHADURI
Similar sentiments are being echoed by yellow taxi operators, for who customers to and from railway stations and the airport have long been a steady source of income. “Our business has been slashed by half since the new metro routes opened. We are incurring the most loss at the two railway stations, Howrah and Sealdah, where all the passengers seem to be opting for the metros. But as the airport link gets more popular, we will suffer there as well,” says Nawal Kishor Shrivastava, convenor of the West Bengal Taxi Operators Coordination Committee.
He adds that this has been the worst hit to Kolkata’s iconic yellow taxis since the COVID lockdowns and is going to impact the livelihoods of thousands of yellow taxi drivers.
While Shrivastava and his fellow yellow taxi owners have decided to write to the Chief Minister regarding this crisis, on August 27, West Bengal Transport Minister Snehasish Chakraborty said at a press conference that the government will try to incentivise bus routes for parallel transport alongside the new metro links.
The Kolkata Metro is a subdivision of the Indian Railways. When PM Modi touched down in Kolkata for the inauguration, West Bengal Chief Minister and former Union Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee took to social media to make a point about how she was associated with the projects.
“Allow me to be a little nostalgic today. As the Railways Minister of India, I was fortunate in planning and sanctioning series of Metro Railway corridors in metropolitan Kolkata,” she said, adding that she had drawn up the blueprints, arranged the funds, and initiated the works.
moyurie.som@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew and Shiv Sahay Singh
