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

Public transport is a crucial arena where mobility and the public sphere intersect. This article examines transport interventions in Shillong, a small hill city in northeastern India, to show how the publicness of transport has become fragmented despite, and often through, successive state-led interventions. In Shillong, the private interests of transport operators are entwined with the state’s responsibility for passenger welfare through provisional and overlapping governance arrangements. This produces a system that is neither an efficient market solution nor a public good advancing equity. Instead, it creates a precarious arrangement that leaves both providers and users dissatisfied, reflecting a political order shaped by rule through exception and rent extraction rather than simple policy failure, eroding trust in transport infrastructure. The article argues that Shillong’s case illustrates the limitations of simple public-private dichotomies in urban transport and calls for considering it as a contested public sphere, often shaped by precarity and negotiation.