I see at least 4 stations daily where there has been literally 0 progress in the past few months.
They could finish rest of the job right? Until land issue is resolved (which don't revokve around that land like stairs etc)
Where do you live? Delhi Metro has been quietly expanding rapidly over the past decade, and you can see fairly constant construction and execution. Same with the Gurgaon Metro.
If you are in Bangalore, its metro was a victim of the Siddarmiah-Shivakumar rivalry (Siddaramaiah backed Mysore and Mangalore at the expense of Bangalore to undercut Shivakumar who has significant investments in Bangalore).
> Until land issue is resolved...
This is the biggest timesink for any Indian infrastructure project. Eminent Domain is basically impossible in India under the LARR, which has constantly delayed infra projects across India.
Of course this is not business friendly at all... And you end up needing SEZs and special "Foo Cities" for land acquisition to even be remotely feasible for Foo companies. But hey atleast SEZs/special cities don't face the same problems.
It also prevents the development of mass dormitories for migrant workers in factories, which is the de facto model adopted across Asia.
> the system descends into things being built on politician owned land and them pocketing the money, or politicians buying up land near an upcoming project where they know LA is done
It works until it doesn't, as can be seen with Bangalore because of the Siddaramiah (Mysore) versus Shivakumar (Bangalore) rivalry, or Panchkula whenever Haryana got a BJP CM because former CM Hooda had significant land interests in Panchkula.
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Eminent domain and "bulldozer raj" might be undemocratic, but it's what helped Urban China clean up in the early 2010s [0][1], when it was in similar shoes to India today. So did South Korea in the 2000s to present [2][3]; Japan in the 1980s to 2000s [4]; and Taiwan in the 1990s to 2010s [5][6].
Urban villages, abadis, bastis, jhuggis, and other informal settlements should be demolished and expropriated to development authorities if India wishes to replicate the Asian model.
Edit: can't reply
> From my weak knowledge of asian countries, I think they took up, loosely speaking, individualistic capitalism
Not really. The main difference was light authoritarianism. India has too much democracy at the local level, where any wannabe neta can block a project by building a Mandir/Masjid or naarabazing "laal salam" or "Jai bhim".
When demolitions and urban renewal projects are executed in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan the full might of the system is used to push it through. No PILs or human interest media stories slow down those demolitions and urban renewals. If they need to crack heads or break a few legs, they will.
India under Indira used to be able to execute at such frequency, but then the counter-reaction in the 1980s and 1990s led to India neutering it's eminent domain laws.
[0] - https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk46cwSCkTs
[2] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-feb-09-fg-korea...
[3] - https://www.listentothecity.org/Resisting-Seoul-s-brutal-apa...
[4] - https://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/documents/d/toshise...
[5] - https://www.taiwantoday.tw/print/Environment/Taiwan-Review/2...
[6] - https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/05/21/...
Two: most likely, an earlier contract to construct the station (and especially for interiors like stairs, it's always a different contract) was cancelled[1] and they have decided to postpone tendering a new contractor for that station, until the nagging land issue is closer to being solved, lest the same issue happen again with the new contractor.
If you meant why can't it be decoupled, well that's because in general some entity in the chain won't give you a completion certificate trusting that you will integrate the two decoupled projects properly later. If you want to make the integration a separate step, no contractor will assume responsibility for it and sign it since the two components are done by others and it becomes a game afterwards of who takes the blame. It's also extremely low margin work. Sometimes, you will see TATA led businesses take the risk and somehow do it, out of altruism towards nation building, but I have not seen any one else do it.
In general the rule with govt contracts is that if there's any problem at all with the contract, all work even if it's unrelated physically speaking, will stop. Because it's related contractually speaking. Such is life.
[1] e.g because the timeline after delays stops being viable for him
