Skip to footer

New Delhi’s pride: its modern metro

So classy, even its riders seem to behave better when aboard.

|
Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
Metro employees help passengers board the train at Rafiv Chowk Metro station in the Delhi metro in New Delhi, India, on November 4, 2011. The Delhi metro, a government-run project, is sleek, efficient and crowded most hours of the day. The first lined opened in 2006, under budget and 3 years ahead of schedule.
  • By Melanie Stetson Freeman Staff photographer

| New Delhi, India

Efficient, clean, air-conditioned, safe: The Delhi metro is a modern wonder amid India’s chaos. Sleek silver trains pull into stations like clockwork.

Orderly commuters line up exactly where the train doors will open. There’s no pushing, no shoving. Uniformed attendants in the busiest stations usher passengers aboard.

The classiness of this public transportation system seems to have imbued riders with heightened civility. (Perhaps someday even the “no spitting” signs won’t be necessary!)

Although photography is usually forbidden, given fears of terrorist attacks, I got ­special permission to take photographs at three stations for exactly one hour. (TV crews got only 15 minutes.) I must have been yelled at by 50 passengers who felt it their civic duty to tell me to stop. Fortunately, I had a letter of permission to brandish.

The first metro line opened in December 2006, under budget and three years ahead of schedule. When finished, the system will be bigger than the sprawling London Underground. Officials say the metro has kept more than 150,000 cars off the road, cutting pollutants in a big way. It has also acted as a stimulus for urban renewal.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to New Delhi’s pride: its modern metro
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2012/0201/New-Delhi-s-pride-its-modern-metro
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe