Monday, March 27, 2006

Public-private partnership in public transport


“The Railways Tourism Policy ’06 lays a lot of importance on public-private partnership (PPP) in tourism products. “There is a huge potential for public-private partnership in rail-tourism services as there are 5m international tourists and 400m domestic tourists.”

In my view all public transport must be privatized. This would lead to healthy competition from service providers who would try and provide the best possible services to the end user. Private participation also means that radical decisions take a shorter time to execute. Considering the sad state of public transport in most major Indian cities, radical ideas are the need of the hour.

Product super-customization is also a natural fallout of a free market scenario. Look at the number of tariff plans that private cellular phone operators provide! On the other hand, the government typically goes for a ‘one size fits all’ strategy that would be easy to execute and implement on a large scale, but not optimal for a customer. For instance, if I was running the
Mumbai locals, I would probably add a couple of AC coaches to it, thereby passing on additional comforts to people who can afford it and use the additional funds to better services for other passengers!

1 comment:

Kim said...

hey Mohit,

Thanks for including me in your links

I've added this site too to my blogroll.
Kim

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