CLEAN AIR INITIATIVES FOR INDORE’S PUBLIC TRANSIT: PLANNING FOR INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS

Abstract

Cities across India are growing rapidly, and with that growth comes a set of mobility challenges that cannot be ignored. Indore, the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh and one of central India's most dynamic urban centres, stands at this very crossroads. Over the past decade, the city has witnessed significant economic expansion, population growth, and outward urban sprawl, all of which have collectively intensified travel demand, worsened traffic congestion, and contributed to a steady decline in air quality. While the city has made meaningful efforts to build a structured public transport framework primarily through the AICTSL bus services and the now-discontinued BRTS corridor, the system continues to fall short in several critical areas. Uneven service distribution, route overlaps, inadequate peripheral connectivity, irregular scheduling, and a lack of integrated infrastructure have reduced public transport's attractiveness, pushing more residents toward private vehicles and deepening the city's environmental and mobility challenges. This thesis, titled "Clean Air Initiatives for Indore's Public Transit: Planning for Infrastructure and Operations," directly confronts these challenges. It aims to understand the current limitations of Indore's fossil fuel-based public transit system and evaluate how electric buses can offer a cleaner, more efficient, and sustainable alternative. Crucially, the study treats this transition not as a simple vehicle swap, but as a comprehensive planning process that must address infrastructure readiness, operational restructuring, and alignment with national and state-level policy frameworks. The study adopts a structured, sequential methodology built around five interconnected steps. It begins with a thorough baseline analysis of the existing public transport system, drawing on both primary observations field surveys across congested corridors, informal interactions with drivers and commuters, and direct assessment of bus stops and depot conditions as well as secondary data from AICTSL operational reports, GIS-based mapping, land-use documents, and traffic studies. This foundation reveals a network that is heavily centralized, corridor-dependent, and radially structured, with routes converging toward the city centre along major arterials such as AB Road, Ring Road, and MG Road. While these corridors handle significant passenger loads, the peripheral and newly developing areas of the city remain underserved, with sparse bus stops, longer headways, and poor last-mile connectivity. Building on this baseline, the study identifies the key operational and environmental challenges embedded in the current system. Ridership analysis across morning, afternoon, and evening-night periods reveals sharply directional peak-hour flows along dominant corridors, with moderate and dispersed travel during afternoons and a gradual decline in demand at night particularly in peripheral areas where safety concerns and limited-service frequency further discourage ridership. Congestion mapping highlights critical pressure points at major intersections such as Sarwate Bus Stand, Vijay Nagar Square, and Rajwada, as well as along corridors including AB Road and MR-10, where high traffic volumes, mixed land use, and continuous activity throughout the day create persistent bottlenecks that delay bus operations. Scheduling analysis further exposes a mismatch between planned timetables and actual operations, with peak-hour services relatively adequate but off-peak services significantly reduced undermining the system's reliability and overall user confidence. A comparative evaluation of electric buses against conventional diesel buses forms the analytical core of the study. Assessed across parameters including distance travelled per day, energy consumption, operational costs, emission output, and service adaptability, electric buses emerge as a clearly superior alternative for Indore's specific context. They offer measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, lower noise pollution, improved energy efficiency, and reduced long-term maintenance costs. However, the study is careful to acknowledge that their successful deployment hinges on several enabling conditions specifically the availability of suitable depot facilities, adequate charging infrastructure, grid readiness, and route-level compatibility. Informed by this analysis, the thesis develops a set of integrated planning proposals. The first addresses route optimization, restructuring the existing network into a more logical, node-based system that reduces redundancy, improves cross-peripheral connectivity, and balances service distribution between core and outer areas. The second focuses on perational improvements optimized scheduling, reduced headways during peak periods, better fleet allocation, and the introduction of real-time monitoring tools to bring redictability and consistency to daily operations. Depot planning forms the third pillar of the proposal: suitable locations for electric bus depots are identified based on land availability, spatial accessibility, and charging infrastructure requirements, ensuring efficient fleet management, minimized dead mileage, and long-term operational reliability. Finally, a data-driven fare structure is proposed, derived from energy consumption figures, passenger capacity data, and operational cost analysis, striking a balance between user affordability and financial sustainability for the transit agency. Throughout the study, alignment with national policy instruments particularly the National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP), the FAME-II scheme, and the National Urban Transport Policy, 2006 is emphasized as an essential enabler. These frameworks not only provide financial incentives and infrastructure support for transitioning to electric buses but also offer an institutional basis for coordinated action between urban planners, transport agencies, and policymakers. The study acknowledges that for a Tier-2 city like Indore, operating under distinct constraints of limited infrastructure capacity and continuously shifting travel behaviour, a locally tailored and context specific planning approach is indispensable. The findings collectively establish that Indore's public transport system is functional but insufficiently integrated, operationally uneven, and structurally unprepared for electrification without deliberate intervention. The proposed framework demonstrates that a well-planned electric transit system can meaningfully improve service quality, reduce congestion, and enhance accessibility particularly for the city's underserved peripheral communities. More broadly, the thesis positions this transition as a defining planning challenge: one that requires equal measures of technical rigour, spatial intelligence, and policy coordination to succeed. In conclusion, this study contributes a practical, scalable, and evidence-based framework for advancing Indore's transition toward clean, efficient, and future-ready public mobility. It also offers transferable insights for other mid-sized Indian cities navigating a similar journey toward sustainable urban transit affirming that electrification, when grounded in comprehensive planning, is not just an environmental imperative but a genuine leap forward for urban quality of life.