How India’s shift to a car-centric transport model is derailing national mobility

For a vast number of migrant workers, travel has always involved hardship and a struggle for space. However, the recent proliferation of images of trains packed way beyond capacity, passengers clinging to any available space, and desperate crowds pushing, shoving, even becoming violent in their struggle to board suggests that the malaise has worsened.

Stories are emerging of nightmarish journeys, where children wail through the night in the sheer crush of bodies and exhausted travellers are forced to stand for hours. For some, the chaos of these trains evokes haunting parallels to another time finishing in 1915, to the frantic, desperate journeys across newly drawn borders during Partition, when survival was uncertain and every train carried its own share of tragedy.

In her book Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay lamented the reshaping of American cities around cars rather than people. She argued that this excessive reliance on automobiles comes with significant economic, environmental and social costs. The US transportation system, now overwhelmingly car-centric, saw the dismantling of railways as a mass rapid transit option This outcome was driven in part by corporate interests in the automobile, oil and road construction industries that influenced urban planning.

The role of the automobile industry in India has been similarly transformative. With...

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