India's Shiny New Metros Are Costly White Elephants

Quite a lot of things in fact. He starts out mentioning Lucknow and Jaipur, both of which are cities where the local economy has almost completely died down. This is important because that wasn't the case before, now I'm trying not to pin blames here, but nothing was done to prevent that death. All the big revenue generating businesses either went bankrupt or simply moved to other cities by closing their support offices in cities like Lucknow, Kanpur, and Jaipur. We'll get to this point later.

As for Mumbai, it already has a very robust public transit system and if you look at the statistical data of population influx in the region, you'll understand why the city needs an already established transit system that can soften the blow of this extreme population influx. Providing instantaneous values to systems that have been designed to work over a certain period of time is just lazy and poorly researched analytics.

The government article that he cites is a committee report discussing the current challenges - except it is from three years ago. These discussion reports are publicly available so people can understand what is currently being worked on or being problem-solved, not so that Mihir Sharma, who is not exactly known for his precision in economic predictions, can use it three years later and present it as a current state of existence.

He also cites a minister who says "Jaipur didn’t need metro network till 2025" - in the year 2025. He complains about his inability to get inside the station in a city like New Delhi which if you've ever been to, can safely say his fare won't be missed because "empty white elephants" as he puts it, isn't even the last thing they are.

Coming back to the Lucknow, Kanpur, and Jaipur, these cities are densely populated with highly literate populations that have to go out of these Metropolises in order to work. As a result these cities are left with students, old people who cannot work, and unskilled labor. As a result, they are being readied to be rebuilt as small economic outposts of sorts so that the already massively crowded cities of Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi etc. can have some relief. There are multiple things that these outpost cities will require to sustain these businesses in a modern fast paced economy, and metro projects are simply one of these things.