Unified metropolitan transport authority key to solving urban public transport woes, says Vinayak Chatterjee of Infravision

Major cities across India are seeing a massive development of public infrastructure, whether its new metro rail lines or new roads and bridges and electric buses. Yet, a lack of cohesiveness and seamlessness in the various modes of public transport means the commuters still face difficulties and have to spend long time in their daily commute.

Vinayak Chatterjee, Founder of Infravision Foundation, stresses on the need for a unified metropolitan transport authority (UMTA) that can solve much of these challenges. UMTA is essentially an overarching authority responsible for all forms of urban transport in a city. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any efforts made in this direction, something that Chatterjee laments.

“Twenty years ago there was a recommendation that every city with a population of above 1 million should have a unified metropolitan transport authority; 53 such cities exist. The problem was known, but nobody did anything about it,” Chatterjee pointed during the Business Today Infrastructure Summit 2026.

Chatterjee, in fact, noted that even the metro rail policy of 2017 made central assistance for metro projects conditional to the state government operationalising UMTA. However, even as new metro rail projects continue to come up, the implementation of UMTA seems to have been forgotten or has just remained on paper.

While, he points fingers at the government for the lack of implementation of UMTA, he also feels the people who face the problems in their everyday commute are also equally to blame, as they haven’t raised the voice enough for the governments to sit up and take notice.

Chatterjee, however, points there is a lot of positive talk now happening on addressing the last mile connectivity challenges through moves such as operationalising feeder buses or allowing metro rail corporations to run such bus services in the neighbourhood localities.

“All of these thoughts are gradually gaining momentum,” he noted.

He also pointed out that projects such as the rapid rail connecting Delhi and Meerut, which makes commuting into central Delhi from Meerut more faster than from the outskirts of Delhi, would also lead to lot of de-congestion.

Chatterjee also feels that public transport project is a state’s responsibility and should not involve private capital.

“Urban transport all over the world is subsidised for larger economic interests and therefore a public transport should not be purely a return on capital game. It should be done by the state,” he stressed.

His comments came in the backdrop of the discussion of the Hyderabad metro rail project, which was run by engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro, but was eventually transferred to the Telangana government as various issues, including lower-than-expected ridership, huge debts and late real-estate monetisation.

At the same time, Chatterjee stated that India has made great strides in public-private partnership model and there are a lot of successes to show for it, whether it was in airports or the huge network of highways that was being built.

Watch the full conversation here