After maintaining stoic silence for nearly a month, the Delhi Metro said Reliance Infra did not conduct timely inspections despite repeated reminders from it and that the repair work could have been carried out without hampering the Metro operations had these defects been noticed earlier.
"As regards the issue of the civil defects noticed on the elevated section of the corridor, it may be mentioned that as per the concessionaire agreement, the concessionaire was supposed to carry out regular inspections to monitor the civil structures.
"However, timely inspections were not carried out despite repeated reminders from DMRC. Had these defects been noticed and pointed out earlier, then the repair work could have been carried out without hampering the Metro operations," Jitendra Tyagi, Director (Works), DMRC, said in a statement here.
The Reliance Infra, in its response, said when it detected that the clips were developing cracks it took a number of actions like imposing Speed restriction on sections wherever the number of cracked clips were large.
Delhi Metro and Reliance Infra have been at loggerheads ever since the 23-km high-speed link was closed down temporarily on July 8 after the concessionaire found faults on the civil structure.
Delhi Metro is currently carrying out the repair works on the civil structure.
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On the issue of Reliance Infra saying that Delhi Metro forced it to procure clips from Vossloh which are found to be faulty now, Tyagi said the moment faults were noticed in the clips on the railway tracks, necessary speed restrictions were imposed by DAMEPL and the required repair work was carried out without hampering Metro operations.
"DMRC never forced or instructed the concessionaire to adopt any particular track system for the Airport Express corridor. Initially, the concessionaire suggested the 'Single Fast Clip (SFC)' system to DMRC, which was not found suitable for a high speed corridor.
"Subsequently, DMRC suggested four track systems to the concessionaire, which are - RHEDA 2000, VIPA, VANGAURD and Double Fast Clip. Apart from RHEDA 2000, all the other systems were from Pandrol, which is a rival company of the German firm Vossloh," he said. (More)