Travelling in a Metro

Few weeks back, I was at Delhi attending a two-day conference on hydropower in India. Delhi is one place I have mostly been to as compared to rest of the cities in India. My first visit to Delhi was some ten years back while I was a college goer. En route to college, after travelling for hours in a train, we used to halt at Delhi to meet our final shopping wishes. Since then I traveled to Delhi on several occasions both on personal reasons and official. Delhi being the capital state of India, one cannot even imagine the human and vehicle population. Take a ride around Delhi and the traffic will move at a snail's pace. To reach a destination of few miles away it will literally take ages to get it there. The honking of the cars will deafen you the first day and blacken your white shirt if unfortunately you are wearing one.

Throughout all these years, I have been experiencing the same fate and never even thought of travelling in a metro. Honestly, the image of Indian metros I had was that of local trains - overly crowded and suffocating. One thing that I dreaded most was falling a victim to pick-pocketing. Imagine yourself being rendered penniless in a wink of an eye and where seniority counts even in the beggar's community. As a matter of fact, not only in Delhi but in non of the metros in India did I commute so far. This time, since the group was large we decided to commute in a metro. I was quite skeptic at first and took a while to get out of my comfort zone. Infact, I got really surprised to see the condition of the train and the boarding system. In my rating it was at par with any other world class metros. It was neat, clean and most important always on time - a complete contradiction to the conventional trains in India. 

Delhi Metro

Inside view of metro

As I write this post I also learned that " Delhi Metro becomes the first metro project in the world to be registered with the prestigious gold standard foundation for its energy efficient measures...". It was not only convenient to travel but was also cheap, faster and reliable. Delhi proves impossible is nothing.