Empty Airports and Half-Finished Highways Plague India After Boom | Dozens of India’s big ticket infrastructure projects have underperformed, echoing China’s problems of the past.
Posted by ProbablySatan420
Empty Airports and Half-Finished Highways Plague India After Boom | Dozens of India’s big ticket infrastructure projects have underperformed, echoing China’s problems of the past.
Posted by ProbablySatan420
2 Comments
https://archive.ph/lIuBs
Unpopular opinion apparently: things will eventually smooth out. We’ve seen this happen with “ghost cities” in China, and the difference is India’s population is still growing and still urbanizing.
That said airports instead of rail for domestic Indian travel is baffling considering India is extremely evenly spread out in terms of population density
Small airports are almost always a terrible “investment” (pork), and that’s fair to call out.
The rest of it is… far less convincing. The non-urban highways, even if they aren’t profitable, have solved a *lot* of the logistics problems India was plagued with until very recently. Being able to move shit around with a medicorum reliability is quite important.
They also mention metros (Bloomberg has another, particularly garbage IMO, article specifically about Indian metros: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-01-29/india-s-shiny-new-metros-are-costly-white-elephants).
My main problems with the whinging about metros, most to least important:
1. Their ‘failure’ is measured by not meeting ridership projections. Except most of these projections were made precovid, so you have the double-whammy of a ridership decline *plus* construction delays (most non-Delhi metro systems have more track underconstruction than actually operating, and network effects… matter… a lot)
2. Metros set a cap on congestion: if road traffic slows below the equivalent metro trip, people switch to the metro until an equilibrium is reached. This is *insanely* important, because the alternative is unbounded congestion.
3. Less important, but India is pretty decent at building metro projects affordably. These aren’t particularly graft-laden projects, and regularly come in at half the cost/km of similar projects in Bangladesh or Vietnam.
I think that the Indian Left has negatively polarized themselves against metros (ironically less so against highways… because they drive) in a particularly unhealthy way, since the BJP has overseen a dramatic expansion and takes credit for that:
You have some legitimate complaints (metro tickets are too expensive! There’s no connecting buses! The sidewalks are shit/non-existant!), but these are almost always presented as “metros are a waste, we should just buy more buses bro” rather than the truth, which is that none of the above issues are inherent metros and should be solved regardless.