BJP's Claim On Cities With Metro Train Services Misses Context
Half of the metros operationalised after 2014 in cities that didn't have one were approved during the Congress-led government before 2014
Image Credit: Shutterstock
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on its Twitter page, on December 27, 2022, claimed that the number of cities in India with metro services had gone up from five in 2014 to 20 in 2022. "Intra-city travel made comfortable and hassle-free with increased Metro projects across the country," the text accompanying the infographic read.
FactChecker looked at annual reports from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and other official sources to verify the claim. We found that six, and not five cities had an operational metro network before 2014. They are Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, Ghaziabad (Vaishali), Bengaluru and Kolkata.
The latter part of the claim is true–the operational metro network had expanded to 20 cities by 2022, including Delhi and seven National Capital Region (NCR) cities, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur, Kochi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Nagpur and Pune.
But of the 14 new metros operationalised between 2014 and 2022, seven had already been approved or sanctioned before 2014. They include Chennai Phase 1, Faridabad, Hyderabad Phase 1, Jaipur Phase 1A, Bahadurgarh, Kochi Phase 1 and Mumbai Line 1 metro projects. This was before the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was voted into power in 2014.
MoHUA's annual report from 2013-14 also specified that work had already started for the Hyderabad Phase 1 Metro and Mumbai Metro Line-1.
FactChecker contacted Dr Sanjay Mayukh, media co-in-charge and national spokesperson for the BJP, for comment and clarification. He re-directed us to the office of Amit Malviya, in-charge of BJP's National Information and Technology Department. We have reached out to him via call and email, and will update the story when we receive a response.
(With inputs from Nileena Suresh, data journalist with IndiaSpend and Rakshitha Narasimhan, intern with IndiaSpend and FactChecker)