“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 (1984-2026) and road accident statistics
India's first metro opened in Kolkata in 1984, carrying 1.47 million passengers in its first year. In FY2025–26 it carried 236 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 mostly moved the other way: 294 fatalities in 2018 fell to 159 in 2023, a 46% decline. But 2024 broke the streak — deaths rose to 191, up 20% in a year, though still 35% below 2018. Pedestrians (79) and two-wheeler riders (76) account for four in five of those deaths.
About this data
What this page shows
Forty years of Metro ridership from 1984 to 2026, road accident deaths for Kolkata city, West Bengal state and national highway trends, a road-user breakdown of fatalities, and fatalities by traffic violation compared with other metros. The Metro now runs five operational lines (Blue, Green, Purple, Orange and Yellow) and carried 2,359.81 lakh journeys in FY2025–26, about 6.5 lakh a day.
Where the data comes from
Ridership is from Metro Railway Kolkata's published statistics (yearly from 1984–85, monthly from 2022–23). Accident and fatality figures come from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) annual reports, accessed via OpenCity, with 2018–2019 Kolkata figures from Kolkata Traffic Police as reported by IANS and 2018–2020 state figures from WB Traffic Police.
Limitations worth knowing
City, state and national road accident series all run to 2024. West Bengal state figures for 2018–2020 come from WB Traffic Police and from 2021 onward from MoRTH; the two sources differ (MoRTH puts 2020 at 10,863 accidents and 5,128 deaths against the police figures of 9,180 and 4,927), so part of the 2020–21 jump is a change of source. West Bengal injury counts are missing for 2021–2024 — MoRTH published accidents and deaths for those years but not injuries. The FY2025–26 Metro total is the sum of Metro Railway's twelve published monthly figures. Kolkata city records for 2018–2019 come from the police and 2022 onward from MoRTH, so year-on-year accident totals across that change are less consistent than the death counts. Station counts and network length are not shown: no official figure could be traced. Ridership is a count of journeys, not of individual riders.
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