In this guest post, Dr Arundhathi discusses her research “Bustling (Im)Mobility: Socio-spatial Negotiations in Delhi’s Bus Terminals” on Delhi’s bus terminals, carried out during her USF International Fellowship, hosted at the Centre for Transport & Society (University of the West of England, Bristol), under the mentorship of Dr William Clayton.
As part of the project “Bustling (Im)Mobility: Socio-spatial Negotiations in Delhi’s Bus Terminals”, I undertook fieldwork in two of Delhi’s interstate cum local bus stations, interviewing over a hundred people, to understand: (i) how bus users make sense of the bus system in the absence of reliable signage and timetables, and (ii) how do bus terminals fit into the changing transport geography of the city? While studies (including media reports) (Bhatt 2019; Gawande and Pradeep 2025; Rathore and Barnagarwala 2025) have documented issues such as lack of frequency, the reduction in the number of bus users, and lack of connectivity, there are few studies documenting the experiences of the infrastructures of bus systems using qualitative methods. The objective of the project was to partially fill this gap and document how the experiences of infrastructures of mobility influence the experiences of mobility.
With nearly 30 million residents, Delhi struggles to provide adequate, reliable, comfortable and affordable public transport to all its citizens. The buses are a crucial piece of the city’s infrastructure, fulfilling nearly 60% of the city’s transport requirement, and are maintained and operated by the government. They are also much cheaper when compared to the Metro, an air-conditioned rail-based mass transit system that has been in operation since 2002. Moreover, buses are also free for women, an initiative meant to encourage greater participation of women in the economy of paid work (Singh 2024). However, the bus service is plagued by several issues, notably the inadequacy of the fleet, unreliable frequency and timetables, and excessive congestion. As a result, passengers are often incentivised to move to faster (and more expensive) means such as the Metro or privately owned vehicles. The supporting infrastructures for bus services, such as bus stops and bus stations/terminals, also contribute to the problem. As infrastructures of waiting, they often lack amenities, exacerbating the experience of waiting.
Given the cheap fares, the bus service is mostly used by socio-economically marginalised citizens, who are compelled to depend on buses because they cannot afford any other means of transport. As a result, the lack of amenities at bus stops/terminals also affects these citizens disproportionately. They are often forced to wait for long, unpredictable durations of time and also find novel ways of adapting to bus stations/stops where there is no reliable signage to clarify where a bus might halt. Thus, we see how the infrastructures of mobility transform into infrastructures of waiting, and who is tasked with the additional “mobility work” (Ravensbergen et al, 2021) of waiting.
Examining the infrastructures of waiting, certain aspects reveal the relationship between public transport and the city. The presence of well-functioning public transport is often an indicator of a thriving and productive city. However, the presence of inadequate infrastructure of some means of transport as opposed to others suggests the presence of a transport hierarchy in the city. This was especially true of bus stations, some of which appeared to have good infrastructure: well-constructed platforms, chairs for seating, boards with route numbers and route maps, toilets, etc. However, traversing these stations and speaking to the regular users revealed that most of these amenities did not always work. Buses do not adhere to a timetable, and they never halt at the location where the board mentions a particular number. Toilets are often dirty and not always free. Though chairs exist, passengers are unsure of when to use them, as they are constantly on the lookout for incoming/outgoing buses, and can never tell where a bus will halt.
Since the bus service does not follow a timetable, officials at enquiry counters cannot help passengers in any other way except by sharing route numbers for specific destinations. While literate passengers can read route maps, or those with access to smartphones can look up information about the routes on the internet, illiterate passengers or those without smartphones are forced to rely on word-of-mouth information, seeking it from fellow passengers in the bus terminals, bus company staff such as drivers and conductors, and even other non-transit users such as vendors. Thus, bus terminals develop a different economy of information, and their ease of use depends on how long people have experienced moving around in them, rather than how objectively they know about their various aspects.
In this way, bus terminals enable us to witness the contradictions in city-making. Bus users imagine the city through the lens of their experiences of using bus terminals. Viewed this way, the infrastructural development of the city starts to seem hollow, as the lack of a reliable bus service and its related infrastructure symbolise how the city itself lacks the means to support some of its most socio-economically marginalised citizens. While the rich can afford either privately owned transport or more expensive means of public transport, such as the Metro, the poor are forced to contend with inadequate services, which in turn frustrates their sense of belonging in a city that does not serve them equally.
References
Bhatt, Amit (2019): “Our cities can learn from Delhi’s rationalisation of bus operations,” Hindustan Times, 27 Feb, https://www.hindustantimes.com/gurgaon/our-cities-can-learn-from-delhi-s-rationalisation-of-bus-operations/story-pmnNjTgcuHtOxX5GR3fIOM.html.
DTIDC. (nd) Swami Vivekanand ISBT, Delhi Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited, Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Available at: https://dtidc.co.in/Home/IsbtDetail/2.
Gawande, Bhaumik, and Revathy Pradeep (2025): “Neighbourhood public transit services: Situational analysis of bus-based public transport supply in Delhi,” Working paper, ID 321, International Council on Clean Transportation, https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ID-321-–-Neighborhood-transit-working-paper-A4-50163-WEB-v5.pdf.
Rathore, Vaishnavi, and Tabassum Barnagarwala (2025): “Why the number of bus users in Delhi and Mumbai has plummeted,” Scroll.in, 4 Aug, https://scroll.in/article/1085059/why-the-number-of-bus-users-in-mumbai-and-delhi-has-plummeted.
Ravensbergen, Léa, K Bruce Newbold, Rebecca Ganann, and Christina Sinding (2021): “‘Mobility work’: Older adults’ experiences using public transportation,” Journal of Transport Geography, 97 (2021) 103221.
Singh, A, and Nishant (2024): “Riding the justice route: Assessing the impact of free bus travel on progress toward gender-just public transport in Delhi,” Greenpeace India Society, Bengaluru, https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-india-stateless/2024/10/c293ab29-riding-the-justice-route-1-compressed.pdf