“What is public anyway?”: The politics of urban transport in Shillong,India

Introduction

“What is public anyway?”

A retired senior bureaucrat in Shillong asked me this question when I inquired whether the city’s shared taxis (vehicles that meet most of Shillong’s transport demand but operate in violation of their permit conditions) could be considered “public transport.” These taxis hold contract carriage permits, which legally restrict them to point-to-point bookings. In practice, however, they ply fixed routes and carry multiple passengers on a shared basis. This makes them the city’s de facto backbone of urban mobility, yet technically “illegal” through a narrow juridico-legal lens. The bureaucrat, deeply familiar with both regulatory frameworks and everyday practices, was well aware of this contradiction. His counter-question unsettled my line of inquiry, but it also revealed a deeper ambiguity: the meaning of “public” in the context of public transport. Rather than centering a formal–informal distinction, this ambiguity points to how publicness is unsettled through the overlapping actions of state agencies, regulatory practices, and everyday governance.

This article takes that ambiguity as its starting point. It examines how different dimensions of publicness, such as legality, ownership, service, and collective good, are unsettled in Shillong’s transport system. Focusing on two government-funded projects to procure buses and microvans, I show how interventions designed to consolidate a meaningful public transport system instead fragmented it further. These schemes did not produce either a coherent market-based solution or a public good oriented toward equity. Rather, they created a precarious assemblage of transport options in which both operators and users remain dissatisfied. I argue that this fragmentation of transport services—driven by overlapping mandates, competing state agencies, and provisional interventions—contributes to the erosion of the city’s public sphere, undermining the link between mobility and collective urban life.

Transport scholarship typically defines public transport in narrow, technical terms: near-universal access, fixed routes and frequencies, and mass capacity (Rodrigue, 2020). In India, a legalist classification adds another layer, distinguishing stage carriage (public transport) from contract carriage (paratransit) permits (Mittal, 2022b). Both approaches reduce publicness to operating conditions, overlooking issues of ownership, funding, and democratic participation. Scholars have critiqued this narrow framing, suggesting that public transport should also be understood in terms of public ownership, public space, public good, and public sphere (Paget-Seekins and Tironi, 2016). While these distinctions provide an important conceptual backdrop, they also risk reifying transport categories in ways that obscure how publicness is actively produced, fractured, and reworked through state-led interventions in practice. This article builds on that critique, asking: what constitutes the “public” in public transport, and how does it emerge—or unravel—in everyday governance?

The case of Shillong is instructive. As the capital of Meghalaya in northeastern India, Shillong is shaped by layered histories of colonial administration, ethnic politics, and fragmented governance. Shared taxis dominate everyday mobility, while state-funded bus and microvan projects have introduced overlapping institutions, short-term contracts, and fragile partnerships—placing the state itself at the center of transport fragmentation. Rather than strengthening transport provision, these interventions have produced new rivalries and regulatory ambiguities. Publicness here is not secured through formalization but becomes contingent and unstable, continually renegotiated among state agencies, private operators, and passengers.

The article draws on longitudinal fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2024, including archival research, newspaper analysis, and interviews. Archival sources include records from the transport and urban development departments, as well as reports from The Shillong Times, a local English-language daily newspaper that has been published since 1945. I also conducted interviews with current and retired officials, as well as owners, drivers, and conductors of buses, taxis, and microvans. While these interviews informed my broader understanding of transport governance and everyday mobility practices in Shillong, they do not feature prominently in this article. This article relies primarily on government records and newspaper reports, as the analytical focus here is on institutional arrangements, policy trajectories, and the politics of transport provision rather than on individual perspectives. Participants were identified through snowball sampling, beginning with government offices and transport associations. Together, these sources trace how transport interventions were designed, implemented, and contested, and how they reshaped both mobility and the meaning of publicness.

The article proceeds in four parts. The following section reviews debates on the relationship between the city, transport, and the public sphere, with particular attention to recent efforts to conceptualize the publicness of public transport. The third section presents the empirical analysis of transport interventions in Shillong, tracing how the introduction of bus and microvan schemes led to the emergence of new actors, overlapping jurisdictions, and fragile arrangements. The fourth section examines how these dynamics fragmented rather than consolidated publicness, eroding the role of transport as a shared urban good and a space for public interaction. The conclusion reflects on the implications of Shillong’s experience for understanding transport governance in other cities of the Global South.

Transport, publicness, and the fragmented urban sphere

The city and mobility have long occupied a central place in theories of modernity. The city has been understood as the locus of cultural innovation, where the concentration of people, institutions, and exchange produces the “ultimate culture of life” (Mumford, 1938; Simmel, 1903). Mobility, meanwhile, is the enabling condition of this urbanity. It is through movement that social connections are established, work and leisure are accessed, and urban life itself becomes possible. As Cresswell (2006) argues, modernity has always been bound up with the expansion of mobility, from everyday circulation within cities to global flows of people and goods. If the city represents the fixed site of modern culture, mobility provides the fluid medium that sustains it.

Alongside these accounts of urban modernity, Habermas’s (1991) notion of the public sphere offers a normative model of democratic life. In Habermas’s formulation, the public sphere is the domain where private individuals collectively deliberate, hold the state accountable, and generate public opinion. Postcolonial scholarship has pluralized the understanding of the public sphere by challenging the universalizing claims of this framework, and arguing that public spheres emerge in multiple, uneven forms across different urban contexts (Dwivedi and Sanil, 2019; Padawangi, 2013; Robinson, 2006). Rather than assuming a singular Western trajectory, these accounts stress that publicness is contingent and situated, shaped by historical struggles, social structures, and the infrastructures through which everyday life is organized.

Transport is one such infrastructure. It not only enables the circulation that sustains urban economies but also shapes the very constitution of public life. In their wide-ranging essay, Fan et al. (2025) argue that urban transport should be understood as a social construct. Moving beyond a narrow view of transport as physical networks or technical systems, they emphasize how transport is embedded in social, cultural, and political dynamics. Their framework integrates three levels: individual outcomes (such as well-being, opportunity, and exclusion), collective dynamics (meanings, contestations, and mobility flows), and systemic relations (the co-evolution of transport with broader political and economic structures). This social-constructivist perspective is especially useful for cities in the Global South, where transport systems are not only technical artefacts but sites where competing claims to publicness are made and remade.

Recent scholarship has increasingly examined public transport as public space, offering nuanced perspectives on how mobility infrastructures constitute publics. Tuvikene et al. (2023) stress the multidimensional character of transport as public space: it is simultaneously convivial and conflictual, regulated and improvised, embedded in histories of modernization and postcolonial politics. By insisting that public transport deserves recognition alongside streets, squares, and parks as key sites of public life, this body of work expands the conceptualization of transport within urban studies scholarship. Sheller (2023) extends this argument by characterizing public transport as a “kinopolitical” terrain, an arena of micro-political struggle where mobile and atmospheric publics are continuously formed. This lens is valuable for understanding contexts like Shillong, where transport is not merely a service but a political space in which rival agencies, private operators, and passengers negotiate authority and belonging.

At a more granular level, scholars have shown how publicness in transport is mediated by both formal rules and everyday practices. Rink (2023), analyzing Cape Town’s Golden Arrow Bus Service, highlights how conditions of carriage and unwritten norms co-produce the publicness of bus spaces, rendering them liminal zones between openness and exclusion. Joseph and Gopakumar (2023), studying Bengaluru, argue that publicness must be seen as contingent, as it is neither reducible to macrostructural policies nor to spontaneous microsocial interactions, but rather emerges through their entanglement. Public transport in their account is not simply a site of encounter but a dynamic assemblage where governance decisions, operator practices, and rider experiences intertwine. These contributions are crucial for this article, as they suggest that publicness is not an inherent property of transport, but an ongoing achievement that often remains precarious and contested.

This recognition has important implications for urban transport policy. Much contemporary transport planning continues to be framed in techno-managerial terms (Kębłowski and Bassens, 2018), treating mobility as a rational, technical problem to be solved through supply-demand modelling, congestion pricing, or bus procurement. This approach is evident in the narrow, technical definition of public transport that dominates policy discourse, which emphasizes near-universal access, fixed routes and frequencies, and mass capacity (Rodrigue, 2020). Such definitions reduce public transport to the operating conditions of vehicles, obscuring its wider social and political significance. Some scholars have attempted to expand this by arguing that public transport should be understood as public not only through its technical design but also through its role in enabling sociality and inclusion (Paget-Seekins and Tironi, 2016). Yet even these efforts often remain descriptive, delineating properties of modes rather than analyzing their implications for publics. The result is a persistent differentiation between public transport and other forms of shared mobility, often called informal transport, such as autorickshaws or taxis—a binary that is analytically limiting in contexts like the Global South, where such modes often form the backbone of everyday mobility (Behrens et al., 2016; Klopp, 2021).

Research on informality has challenged binary distinctions between “formal” and “informal” transport. While earlier scholarship highlighted the centrality of informal modes in meeting mobility needs in the Global South (Cervero, 1991; Cervero and Golub, 2007), more recent work has shifted toward analyzing “informalities in transport” (Agbiboa, 2016; Mittal, 2022b; Rekhviashvili et al., 2022). This perspective reveals how informality is co-produced through the interactions of states, operators, and users, cutting across North-South contexts. It also shows that informality is not external to the state but often facilitated by policy design, contractual gaps, or selective enforcement. In Shillong, as will be shown, the layering of state schemes, overlapping institutions, and fragile partnerships with private actors has created precisely such conditions of institutionalized informality within public transport.

Critiques of techno-managerialism highlight how transport governance can depoliticize mobility, concealing its distributive consequences, and reinforcing uneven development (Addie, 2013; Oviedo Hernández and Dávila, 2016). In practice, the turn to managerialism often produces what Graham and Marvin (2001) call “splintering urbanism,” infrastructures that deepen socio-spatial divides rather than fostering inclusive publicness. Evidence from across the Global South underscores this pattern, where state-led transport projects often privilege elite mobility corridors while neglecting peripheral populations (Deka, 2017).

Taken together, these literatures reposition transport as a political and social infrastructure that actively shapes cities, publics, and the public sphere. This article contributes to these debates by examining Shillong, a small hill city in northeastern India, where state-led efforts to formalize transport through programs such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) have not produced coherent public services but rather a patchwork of agencies, contracts, and fragile arrangements. Far from creating a stable public good, these interventions have intensified competition, undermined regulation, and generated precarious conditions for both passengers and operators. In so doing, they illustrate the limitations of viewing public transport solely as infrastructure or policy, and the necessity of analyzing it as a contested and fragmented public sphere.

Fragmenting public transport in Shillong

Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, a small hill state in northeastern India (Figure 1), borders Bangladesh to the south and west and Assam to the north and east. It is one of the country’s few Christian- and tribal-majority states. Home to three matrilineal tribes—Garo, Khasi, and Jaintias—alongside migrant communities from the surrounding plains, Meghalaya was carved out of Assam in 1972 after a prolonged tribal struggle that reshaped the region’s political geography (Hussain, 1987). Shillong, which had served as Assam’s capital under the British Imperial rule since 1874, became the new state capital of Meghalaya while Assam’s administrative center shifted to Dispur. Established by the British in 1864 after acquiring land from a local Syiem (chieftain), the city from the outset bore deep social divisions (Hasan, 2011). The British administration recruited Bengalis (and later Assamese) into the bureaucracy, while entrepreneurs from Bengal and elsewhere established businesses. Christian missionaries arriving in the mid-19th century converted a significant portion of the monotheistic, nature-centric Khasi population to Christianity (Syiemlieh, 2005).

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Figure 1.

Location of Shillong in India.

These dynamics produced tensions between Khasis (mostly Christian) and non-Khasis (largely Hindus and Muslims). After independence, subtle and overt negotiations turned the city into “a veritable theatre of popular politics” (Hasan, 2011: 88). With statehood in 1972, identity politics became sharper, culminating in major anti-Bengali and anti-Nepali riots in 1979, 1987, 1992, 1997, and 1998 (McDuie-Ra, 2006, 2007). Violence against Dalit Sikhs in 2018 continued this pattern of Khasi aggression against the “outsiders,” often called Dkhar—many times employed as a racist slur used to further xenophobic hate (Das et al., 2025).

These Khasi–Dkhar tensions also influenced Shillong’s transport politics. Public transport began in the 1940s when a Bengali businessman converted military trucks into buses and called them “City Bus.” After Indian independence, the City Bus service expanded under Bengali ownership and was formalized in 1954 through the formation of the Shillong City Bus Syndicate (SCBS), a registered co-operative. Benefiting from the Motor Vehicles Act (MV Act), which favored cooperatives, the SCBS monopolized permits for Stage Carriage vehicles.

After Meghalaya’s formation, the District Transport Office (DTO), the government department responsible for issuing permits, sought to dismantle this monopoly by limiting City Bus permits and encouraging smaller “Mini Buses,” which they argued were better suited to the city’s narrow roads. Owned mainly by Khasis, Mini Buses rivalled City Buses. This policy shift, combined with anti-Dkhar riots, prompted many Bengalis to leave, reducing City Bus numbers. Mini Buses peaked in the 1980s but failed to maintain dominance. Their services were erratic because individual permit holders subcontracted vehicles to drivers and conductors who prioritized profit over regularity.

Economic liberalization of India in the late 1980s and 1990s further transformed Shillong’s transport. The automobile industry in the country expanded (Piplai, 2001); car loans became accessible, and a 1989 amendment to the MV Act liberalized vehicle permits. Many in Shillong applied for local taxi permits, officially designated as Contract Carriage, but in practice operating as shared taxis on fixed routes. Offering better frequency, reach, and speed than buses, they soon became the city’s dominant mode of transport. Taxi owners organized themselves in various “associations” or “syndicates” to control local territories, consolidating their influence.

By the late 2000s, shared taxis had eclipsed both the City and Mini Buses. The arrival of JNNURM-funded buses in 2010 introduced yet another shift. Although designed for Urban Local Bodies to own and operate, implementation took a different course, fragmenting the publicness of transport provision—a process explored in the following subsections.

Governing transport through temporariness

The Shillong case illustrates how transport interventions have been governed more through ad hoc and provisional fixes than through long-term planning. When buses stood idle due to disputes between MUDA and MTC, tenders were hastily floated. When buses could not reach narrow lanes, microvans were introduced. When maintenance under MTC operation collapsed, short-term rent-seeking contracts with SHGs proliferated. Each measure was provisional, yet over time, these temporary arrangements became the default mode of governance. The temporary became permanent, and the exceptions became rules.

Agamben’s (2005) notion of rule by exception sheds light on these practices more clearly. Faced with recurring crises, such as idle buses, broken contracts, and underperforming operators, the state responded not with systemic reform but with provisional measures: temporary contracts, improvised tenders, and one-off interventions. Each was framed as a stopgap, yet together they became the normal mode of governance. The continual production of exceptions enabled the state to retain control while sidestepping the responsibilities of long-term planning and public accountability. In this sense, Shillong’s transport landscape exemplifies governance through exception. In this state of exception, every breakdown presented an opportunity for the executive to assert discretionary authority, often in ways that privileged rent extraction over public service, making it difficult to distinguish between the public good and profit-making.

Arendt (1958) warned that the collapse of distinctions between the public and the private undermines the very basis of collective life. In Shillong, this collapse is evident in the blurring of responsibilities between state agencies and private operators. Vehicles nominally owned by MUDA or SMB were run by contractors whose primary concern was profit, while state officials extracted rents without committing to service provision. The result was a hybrid system that was neither market-driven nor genuinely public, but a patchwork of ad hoc bargains. Arendt described how, under such conditions, the executive state becomes “faceless,” evading responsibility while consolidating power. This dynamic is evident in Shillong, where no single agency can be held accountable for service failures, despite the bureaucracy’s increasing control over permits, contracts, and revenue streams.

This condition resonates with Simone’s (2020) observation that temporariness has become a permanent feature of urban life, a rhythm through which people endure uncertainty. For operators in Shillong, temporariness means contracts that can be revoked or renegotiated at any time, wages tied to precarious daily returns, and vehicles vulnerable to breakdowns without institutional support. For passengers, it means relying on services whose routes, fares, and quality shift unpredictably. Temporariness thus permeates both sides of the system, shaping mobility as a condition of uncertain endurance rather than stable provision.

Bailey et al.’s (2002) concept of “permanent temporariness” is also useful. They describe how transitional conditions become entrenched, disciplining bodies and fragmenting communities. In Shillong, permanent temporariness allows the state to maintain control while avoiding accountability. By regulating permits and vehicles but outsourcing operations, the bureaucracy disciplines operators into compliance by keeping their access to routes, licenses, and operating permissions contingent and revocable, without guaranteeing stable livelihoods or services. The resulting competition between buses, microvans, and taxis divides groups that might otherwise mobilize collectively. Instead of forming a unified “public” capable of asserting claims, transport providers, and passengers are kept in fragmented struggles for survival.

Transport here also exemplifies what Mohammad and Sidaway (2016) call punctuated temporalities: lives organized around breaks, crises, and uncertain continuities. Each intervention—the arrival of JNNURM buses, the introduction of SSPTS microvans, the launch of the shared school bus scheme—initially promised stability. Yet each soon dissolved into the same cycle of breakdowns, disputes, and ad hoc fixes. These punctuations produced recurring moments of hope and disappointment, eroding trust in both the state and the system.

The analysis of temporariness underscores a broader claim: public transport in Shillong is not simply weak or inefficient, but strategically provisional. By ruling through exceptions, the state avoids committing to stable systems of ownership, financing, and accountability. This leaves operators and passengers in a state of permanent adjustment, fragmented from one another and unable to consolidate collective claims. Far from being outside the state, this condition was produced by the state’s own practices of provisional governance, which transformed exception into norm and temporariness into permanence.

Conclusion: Reconsidering the public in public transport

The question posed by a retired bureaucrat: “what is public anyway?” cuts to the heart of Shillong’s transport system. The case demonstrates that publicness is not guaranteed by state ownership, nor by the market, but is continually negotiated and often undone in practice.

Viewed through the lens of Paget-Seekins and Tironi (2016), in ownership terms, the JNNURM buses were considered “public” because they were state-owned. In operational terms, the SSPTS microvans were “public” because they provided shared mobility. In political terms, shared taxis were “public” because they met the city’s everyday needs. Yet each of these forms of publicness was unstable, fragmented by overlapping jurisdictions, rent-seeking arrangements, and provisional fixes. Cumulatively seen, what emerges is not a deficit of public transport as such, but a persistent inability to stabilize what the public in public transport is meant to be.

The Shillong case thus reveals a contrary dialectic: public transport is homogenized as “public” through state schemes, but segmented in practice through fragmented ownership, informalized contracts, and ad hoc regulation. Equality, plurality, and welfare—the normative foundations of “the public” —are lost in the process. Public transport here is neither a coherent public good nor an efficient market service, but a precarious system where publicness itself is always at risk of fragmentation.

The analysis presented in the article unsettles the dominant understanding of public transport, governance, and the politics of urban mobility. In Shillong, buses, microvans, and taxis reveal that transport cannot be reduced to infrastructure or service provision, nor can governance be read simply as strong or weak. What appears as inefficiency or failure is better understood as a political order in which rents are extracted, responsibilities displaced, and publics fragmented. This perspective reframes public transport scholarship by foregrounding fragmentation and temporariness as constitutive features of governance rather than anomalies to be corrected. It also deepens urban studies accounts of governance in the Global South by showing how rule by exception, rent-seeking, and provisional fixes shape not only infrastructure but the very possibility of collective life. In this sense, the politics of urban transport in Shillong is not just about moving people, but about continually remaking (and eroding) the grounds of the public itself.

This contributes to recent debates by underscoring Fan et al.’s (2025) call to view transport as a social construct whose meaning cannot be inferred from technical definitions or legal categories alone. It extends Joseph and Gopakumar’s (2023) idea of contingent publicness by demonstrating that in Shillong, publics are not simply entangled across micro and macro scales, but are actively fractured by competing state agencies and rent-seeking cabals (Heller et al., 2019). It also demonstrates how public transport as a mobile public sphere (Sheller, 2023; Tuvikene et al., 2023) can be eroded by governance practices that multiply ownership while displacing responsibility.

The dynamics observed in Shillong resonate with experiences elsewhere, suggesting broader relevance beyond this specific case. In Dar es Salaam, for example, the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit sought to formalize public transport but instead displaced informal operators and reproduced precarious labor relations without delivering the promised public benefits (Rizzo, 2017). In South Africa, efforts to restructure minibus taxi systems through partial state intervention have similarly fragmented responsibility and deepened insecurity for workers and users (Wood, 2022). More recently, the Jeepney Modernization Program in the Philippines illustrates how state-led modernization can erode the social foundations of shared mobility, marginalizing drivers and weakening the publicness of transport even as it claims to formalize it (Gatarin, 2024; Sunio et al., 2019). Taken together, these cases suggest that formalization often generates new forms of informality and fragmentation rather than resolving them.

Building on Wood’s (2025) argument that transport “failure” should be understood as a socially and politically produced condition rather than a technical breakdown, this article treats public transport as a key site where publicness is enacted, negotiated, and fractured. Wood shows how transport systems are sustained through hybrid arrangements that entangle private operators with partial and uneven state responsibility, producing shared precarity for workers and users. This article extends that critique by foregrounding the implications of such arrangements for the public sphere itself. Rather than occupying an ambiguous space between public and private, transport systems constitute contested public spheres in which responsibility, care, and authority are continually renegotiated. The analytical shift, therefore, is from transport failure as an outcome to the processes through which publicness is fragmented, reproduced, and challenged in everyday mobility.

At the same time, this article has clear limitations. While drivers and conductors appear throughout the analysis as frontline operators, their everyday perspectives are not examined in depth. Interviews conducted as part of the broader research indicate that many drivers do see themselves as providing a public service, even as they navigate insecure contracts, shifting regulations, and competitive pressures to earn their livelihoods. However, a sustained engagement with their experiences—particularly their relationships with vehicle owners, bureaucrats, police, and passengers—lies beyond the scope of this article, which focuses on institutional arrangements and policy trajectories.

These limits point to several directions for future research. Ethnographic work centered on drivers and conductors could deepen understanding of how publicness is enacted and contested through everyday labor practices and negotiations with owners, bureaucrats, police, and passengers. Comparative research across cities of different sizes and positions within national urban systems, and across countries, could illuminate which transport governance practices travel and which remain locally specific, and how similar techniques of formalization and contracting operate as biopolitical tools shaping state–society relations. Finally, further engagement with the questions of transport justice could move beyond normative assessments of access and equity to examine how fragmented transport systems become sites where claims over responsibility, care, and rights are articulated and contested vis-à-vis the state.