Public utility in transition: Institutional reform and governance challenges in Mumbai's BEST undertaking

Urban public transport systems are central to the functioning of cities, shaping access to essential services, spatial equity, and economic and environmental outcomes. The governance and financial sustainability of these systems are deeply embedded in evolving institutional structures. This paper examines the long-term institutional evolution of Mumbai's Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) Undertaking, a unique public utility that has historically integrated and bundled public transport and electricity distribution. Using a historical institutionalist framework, we trace BEST's trajectory from a colonial tramway company to a welfare-oriented municipal utility, and more recently, to a fragmented and financially distressed public institution navigating neoliberal reforms. Drawing on archival sources, policy documents, and stakeholder interviews, we show how path-dependent practices like power-purchase agreements, service jurisdictions, and cross-subsidization shaped governance, financial sustainability, and service delivery over time. The dismantling of the cross-subsidization model following electricity sector liberalisation represented a critical juncture, triggering institutional fragmentation and long-term decline. Subsequent car-centred infrastructure planning, along with reforms related to labour relations, the adoption of public–private partnerships, and infrastructure financialization, reoriented governance toward fiscal discipline, often at the expense of service equity, operational stability, and public accountability. The paper contributes to debates on urban infrastructure governance and post-colonial urbanism by demonstrating how market-oriented reforms interact with inherited institutional logics, producing uneven outcomes for different actors and groups. It argues that sustainable public transport reform requires institutionally grounded approaches that account for historical legacies, governance capacity, and adherence to a public service mandate.