If Delhi’s roads are a contact sport, the metro is the gentleman’s game — orderly, efficient, and surprisingly pleasant. It covers vast swathes of the capital with clean carriages, frequent trains, and fares so low they feel like a clerical error.
Delhi Metro handles roughly 6.5 million passengers a day and clocked 2.35 billion journeys in 2025. That’s not a transit system; that’s a small civilisation commuting.
The first coach of every train is reserved for women — men who wander in will be politely but firmly asked to leave.
Peak hours — 8 to 10 a.m. and 5 to 8 p.m. — are brutal, the kind of crowded where you could feel the exact change in the next person’s pocket without looking. Before that security lines seem to snake forever as every bag goes through an X-ray and every person through a metal detector.
The metro’s one limitation is the last mile. Your final destination may still be a ten-minute auto-rickshaw ride from the nearest station. Check your route on Google Maps beforehand.
A side-note worth mentioning: every auto-rickshaw, taxi, metro train, and bus in Delhi runs green — either on compressed natural gas or electric power. It may not single-handedly solve the pollution problem, but it’s a small, stubborn point of civic pride, like a city planting trees in a desert.