As of 27 April 2020, this is the first piece of a multi-part post featuring views from ICLEI South Asia Secretariat

India announced the world’s biggest nation-wide lockdown affecting the lives of 1.3 billion people on 24 March. Initially set until 15 April, the quarantine has been extended to 3 May as a pre-emptive measure to contain the infection.  In transport, it meant the stop of about 13,000 trains run daily by the India Railways, all flights, and most public transport services, to discourage the inter and intra-city mobility of people. In all twelve major Indian ports, screening, detection, and containment protocols for people and goods have been established.

A traffic light system to ease the lockdown

Public transport, including shared mobility and paratransit services, has been suspended during the lockdown. As a consequence, walking, cycling, or personal vehicle trips are restricted to access essential services like groceries and hospitals.

Cities are still required to ensure basic services. Some cities like Delhi are operating bus services at 30 percent capacity to safely ferry people involved in the provision of essential services. However, operations of mass transit systems, such as the metro, are completely halted at the time of writing.

Though essential and emergency services are available, selective movements of people to access essentials are permitted due to which travel frequency to places like grocery markets, food warehouses, farmers’ markets, specialty food shops, drug stores, and pharmacies dropped by over 70%.

It is anticipated that once lockdown is over on 3 May, selective regional travel might be permitted based on the number of active COVID-19 cases. The national government has already demarcating regions as red, orange, and green zones, which shall dictate the flexibility in the movement of people.

Cleaner public transport for safer trips

Before the country-wide quarantine, some states like Kerala called for a partial lockdown. In Kochi, public transport took a high toll since mid-March: ridership in private buses went down by 40 percent, and auto-rickshaw operators registered a drastic decrease in demand for their services.

In India, trains, buses, and other forms of public transport are often overloaded and unhygienic, the ideal environment for the spread of the infection. Aiming to gain public trust and reassure passengers, transport operators are taking advantage of the forced halt in operations to improve their standards. In the wake of the health emergency, the Delhi Metro and buses, and Mumbai’s local trains have been sanitized. The government has also decided to enhance the hygiene condition of these two highly essential services. In Delhi, stations are being cleaned more regularly. In Mumbai, railway authorities trained their staff to identify symptomatic passengers. Despite this, the challenge is huge. Mumbai’s suburban railway system has the highest passenger density in the world; it serves about 8 million commuters travel daily. The COVID-19 outbreak, while posing a lot of questions on the future operations and business model of this often densely loaded and intensely utilized Indian public transport systems, it has already started to transform operations to ensure safer trips for both drivers and passengers.

Freight transport as a lifeline

Freight transport is the backbone of the economy. It connects markets, suppliers, and customers. In India, the logistics sector has the potential to employ 40 million people and contribute to USD 200 billion to the economy. To maintain the supply of essentials, both inter-state and intra-state movement of freight vehicles are allowed. The national government has given instructions to local authorities to proactively facilitate the truck and driver movement. However, there is a visible supply chain disruption.

The pandemic heavily affected the Indian freight sector, which is based on the traditional approach of trucking, loading, and unloading, and material handling. The trucking industry directly employs 30 million people, and more than 150 million people depend on it for their livelihood. The outbreak has amplified the issues specific to the Indian logistics sector, such as high fragmentation and low technology development. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of fleet owners are small, as they own up to five vehicles. These small players rely on very low-profit margins, which will not allow them to sustain a loss of business for an extended time. A source of concern is the lack of modern tools and equipment to disinfect the goods.

The lockdown has resulted in a shortage of drivers and loading and unloading staff, which in turn has generated delays in delivery and disruption in the supply chain with potential impacts in other sectors. Due to its structural weaknesses and other compounding effects, such as the millions of daily wage workers migrating back to their hometowns, the freight sector might not be so fast in recovering due to labor shortage.

 These unusual times call for unprecedented collaboration across levels of government and sectors to ensure a solid supply chain as an essential service. For the last-mile delivery, the government had asked e-commerce platforms to stop the delivery of non-essentials and use the network for the supply of essentials like food, groceries, vegetables, and medicines. For instance, food delivery chains are supplying essentials to consumers.

Need for financial support and beyond

There are limited private transport operators in India except for the ones involved in shared mobility and informal transport. The government is already providing financial incentives through various means such as direct cash transfer, loan installment waivers, food supply, to vulnerable people involved in informal transport for the period of lockdown. However, the above initiatives are facilitated by either state or national governments. Cities with limited capacities are hardly able to provide any incentives to people involved in informal transport. 

Subsidies and funding support aside, the need of the hour is to safely lift the lockdown and set up operating protocols to resume services, perhaps at 30% capacity occupancy and enhanced hygiene. Shared mobility is getting impacted heavily, and there is a need to find innovative ways to observe physical distancing to safely and efficiently continue the business.

For the freight sector, it will be important to assess the sector’s capacity to rapidly adapt to the sudden change in demand and develop technological solutions able to facilitate processes such as electronic documentation. Like in public transport, financial incentives could include subsidies and tax deductions.

Until a preventive cure is found, the most likely scenario is that people will be required to make adjustments to their lifestyle and transport operators both for people and for goods will need to rethink their business model, operations, and regulations to safely deploy their services.