MADC keen on building monorail in Nagpur

After the cargo hub, the Maharashtra Airport Development Company (MADC) has now shown interest in developing the proposed mono rail project in Nagpur city much to the chagrin of the Nagpur Improvement Trust which had made the proposal earlier.

R C Sinha, Managing Director and Vice Chairman of MADC has sent a proposal to the state government and has asked for Rs 25 crore for preparing a Detailed Project Report (DPR).

Meanwhile, the Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT), which had taken interest in the project over an year ago and had already appointed L&T Rambol consultants for preparing the DPR, is peeved. It has strongly opposed any such move by the MADC.

MADC sources claimed that the decision about the mono rail project was taken at a meeting held at Mumbai on March 16. The Maharashtra government had also instructed NIT to hand over the feasibility report prepared by L&T Rambol to the MADC.

Meanwhile, MADC wants to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR) prepared by some other expert agency. Sinha said that the NMC and the NIT should focus on protecting the land on which the project is to come up. Encroachments if any should be removed and the land coming in the proposed rail corridor re-claimed.

The mono rail proposal was submitted to state government?s Urban Development Department (UDD) by the NIT. It also submitted that Met Rail of Malaysia had shown interest in it. They had, in fact, proposed to start the project on build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis, the NIT told the state government.

Sources claimed that NIT had taken strong objection to MADC's proposal. The NMC too has made a provision of Rs 1,500 crore for the project as a part of its master plan under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The NMC had also proposed that the project be taken up on BOT basis.

Some experts have also questioned the need for a mono rail network in the city. The existing traffic does not justify such a project, they claimed adding that the Planning Commission had time and again said that such projects should only be taken up if users were prepared to pay proper charges for it. "Subsidising travel by mono rail will only add to costs," they said.

"Why don't they try dedicated bus corridors instead," questioned Paramjit Singh Bhatti, a concerned citizen who runs a big transport business. There are other mass rapid transport systems too and can be operated on a much lesser rate, questioning the motive behind all agencies promoting the mono rail project. The businessman said that it was proven that the cost of running a railway service was a thousand times more than that of operating a good bus service.

"They can reduce the frequency of service when the load is low and increase it during peak hours. But in the case of a rail project, the entire train has to be run irrespective of load," he claimed adding that Nagpur does not have such traffic loads. "This is not Mumbai where lakhs have to be moved," he said.