Telangana Transport Minister Ponnam Prabhakar on Saturday, May 18 criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his claim that the low patronage in Telangana metro was due to the state government’s Mahalakshmi scheme providing free bus rides for women.
Prabhakar said that PM Modi could not digest the fact that women were travelling free of cost, adding that the PM was “lowering his image” by addressing trivial matters.
In an interview with the India Today group, PM Modi had criticised the Telangana government’s free bus scheme for women. "You build a metro in a city and then to win elections in the same city you promise free bus rides to women. This means you are taking away 50% of your metro passengers," Modi said.
The PM’s comments came a week after Larsen & Toubro (L&T), the group handling the Hyderabad Metro Rail project on a public private partnership model, made a similar statement. L&T’s president and Chief Financial Officer R Shankar Raman blamed the Telangana Congress government’s ‘Mahalakshmi scheme’, for low ridership.
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Srinivas Alavilli, an Integrated Transport and Road Safety Fellow at the World Resources Institute (WRI) and a sustainable mobility advocate, compared Raman’s complaints against free public transport to free school education. “Metro and buses have different commuters. Both have a lot of scope to grow in every city as India grows. L&T wants to exit for other reasons and is making excuses,” he said.