With Hyderabad Metro Rail’s Phase-II still stuck on the drawing board and Phase-I grappling with capacity constraints and no new rakes in sight, commuters are turning their attention to a system that already exists but remains underused: the Multi-Modal Transport System, simply known as MMTS. Citizens are urging the South Central Railway (SCR) to ramp up services, improve frequency and ensure punctuality, arguing that if the Metro cannot scale up quickly, MMTS is best placed to plug the gap,especially along the city’s dense suburban corridors.
Currently, around 80 MMTS services link Hyderabad and Secunderabad with suburbs such as Falaknuma, Lingampally, Umdanagar, Cherlapalli and Medchal, carrying nearly 60,000 passengers a day. This is a sharp drop from the earlier 121 daily services and a carrying capacity of about 1.5 lakh before MMTS Phase-II became operational.
“It is no longer possible to travel by metro during peak hours. MMTS can fill the gap if Railways and the government act, as it will take a few years for metro rail extension,” says V. Kumar, a public sector staffer.
To its credit, SCR, in recent months, has been working to streamline MMTS services, keeping available trains close to pre-announced schedules during morning and evening peak hours. Officials say trains now run at about 45-minute intervals between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., though 15-to 20-minute delays persist. SCR currently operates 14 rakes of nine coaches each, and there is rising demand to run services on Saturdays, as most people “except a segment of the IT workforce” work that day.
