By Ashwani K. Muthoo, Director General, Independent Evaluation Office, New Development Bank
India is no longer debating whether infrastructure drives economic growth. That debate is settled. The more relevant question today is whether every infrastructure investment is delivering the economic transformation it was designed for.
The question comes at an important moment. India’s infrastructure push is unprecedented. The National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) envisages investments of over $2 trillion across thousands of projects, while the central government’s capital expenditure has risen more than four-fold over the past decade – from Rs 2.6 trillion in 2017-18 to over Rs 11 trillion in 2025-26. Under initiatives such as the PM Gati Shakti, India is not merely building roads, railways, ports and airports, it is creating the physical backbone for its ambition of becoming a developed economy by 2047. The challenge now is to ensure that these investments translate into measurable gains in productivity, competitiveness and quality of life.
But building infrastructure is only half the story. The greater challenge lies in ensuring that roads create markets, railways expand labour mobility, logistics corridors improve industrial competitiveness and transport systems reshape regional economies. In other words, success must increasingly be measured not only by what is built, but by what changes because it was built.
India’s first regional rapid transit system (RRTS) between Delhi, Ghaziabad and Meerut provides an opportunity to examine this transition. More than a modern transport corridor, it represents a new way of thinking about infrastructure, as an instrument of economic transformation. An independent evaluation undertaken by the Independent Evaluation Office of the New Development Bank (NDB) provides valuable evidence on how that transformation can be assessed and, equally importantly, what lessons can inform future infrastructure investments.
Key insights from the study
The most visible outcome of the RRTS is a dramatic reduction in travel time. The 82 km corridor reduces the Delhi-Meerut journey from nearly four hours by road to under an hour. Ultimately, the corridor is expected to serve over 800,000 passengers daily, illustrating the scale at which improvements in mobility can influence labour markets, business activity and regional development. Yet the real significance of that change lies not in faster trains, but in what faster journeys make possible.
Every minute saved expands the geography of opportunity.
A larger commuting radius allows businesses to recruit from wider labour markets. It enables professionals to access better employment opportunities without relocating. It makes emerging cities more attractive for investment while easing pressure on metropolitan centres. It encourages businesses, educational institutions and housing markets to evolve beyond traditional urban boundaries. Over time, these individual decisions reshape regional economies.
Travel time, therefore, is not simply a transport metric. It is an economic one.
This is perhaps the most important lesson emerging from the evaluation. Operational sections of the corridor have already demonstrated significant travel time savings, improvements in passenger comfort and safety, reduced vehicular emissions and early productivity gains. These are encouraging indicators that the project is beginning to deliver on its wider development objectives.
At the same time, the evaluation offers an equally important reminder: infrastructure alone does not guarantee economic transformation.
Ridership remains below initial projections, not because the engineering has fallen short, but because supporting systems are still catching up. Multimodal integration, feeder services, first- and last-mile connectivity and interoperable ticketing all influence whether people choose public transport over private vehicles. These are often seen as operational issues. In reality, they determine whether infrastructure achieves its intended economic impact.
This insight has implications far beyond one transport corridor.
India is investing in industrial corridors, dedicated freight corridors, multimodal logistics parks, metro rail systems and new regional connectivity projects. Increasingly, the value of these investments will depend not only on the quality of individual assets, but on how effectively they function as integrated systems. Infrastructure today creates the greatest value when connectivity extends beyond engineering into governance, planning and user experience.
It is here that independent evaluation assumes growing importance.
Traditionally, infrastructure monitoring has focused on implementation – whether projects were delivered on time, within budget and according to specifications. Those metrics remain necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. Policymakers also need evidence on whether investments are changing economic behaviour, improving productivity, reducing emissions and strengthening regional competitiveness. Such evidence enables governments to refine policy, improve future project design and maximise the return on public investment.
This is also where multilateral development institutions are evolving. Financing remains central to their mandate, but knowledge is becoming an equally valuable contribution. NDB supported the RRTS through a $500 million sovereign loan financing critical components, including rolling stock and signalling systems. Through its Independent Evaluation Office, it has also contributed objective evidence that can strengthen future infrastructure planning not only in India but across other emerging economies facing similar urbanisation challenges.
India’s infrastructure ambitions are among the largest anywhere in the world. The challenge now is not simply to build more, but to ensure that every investment delivers measurable economic and social returns.
The Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS demonstrates that the true value of infrastructure cannot be measured in kilometres of track or minutes saved. It must be measured in stronger labour markets, more competitive businesses, cleaner cities and greater economic opportunity. Infrastructure may begin as an engineering project, but its lasting legacy is always an economic one.