“The sound of a Kolkata tram is the sound of a city that refused to let go of the past.”
Kolkata Transport — Metro & Road Safety
Metro ridership trends (1984-2025) and road accident statistics
India's first metro opened in Kolkata in 1984, carrying 1.47 million passengers in its first year. In FY2024–25 it carried 218.12 million— an all-time peak, and a complete recovery from the pandemic, when ridership collapsed to 26.52 million in 2020–21.
Road deaths have moved the other way, and that is the good news: 294 fatalities in 2018 fell to 159 in 2023, a 46% decline. Pedestrians still account for the largest single share.
About this data
What this page shows
Forty years of Metro ridership from 1984 to 2025, road accident deaths for Kolkata city, West Bengal state and national highway trends, a vehicle-wise breakdown of fatalities, and traffic enforcement figures. The Metro now runs 6 lines across 58 operational stations and 73.42 km, carrying about 597,260 passengers on an average day, with 22 more stations under construction.
Where the data comes from
Ridership is from Metro Railway Kolkata and Indian Railways. Accident and fatality figures come from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) annual road accident reports, accessed via OpenCity.
Limitations worth knowing
City-level road accident data runs to 2023; national highway figures extend to 2024, so the two series end in different years and should not be compared at their endpoints. West Bengal injury counts are missing for 2021–2023 — MoRTH published accidents and deaths for those years but not injuries. The 2018 and 2019 city records also use slightly different accident definitions, with 2018 reporting fatal accidents only, so year-on-year accident totals are less consistent than the death counts. Ridership is a count of journeys, not of individual riders.
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