Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee will inaugurate the second section of the Delhi Metro Rail Project _ a 4.5 km link between Tis Hazari and Trinagar on October 2. With this, the 8.3 km Shahdara-Tis Hazari line, operational since December 2002, will get extended to 12.8 km.
Announcing this here today, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) chairman Madan Lal Khurana said commissioning of the 4.5 km corridor between Tis Hazari in North Delhi and Trinagar in West Delhi would make 12.8 km of the 28 km line operational.
The Tis Hazari-Trinagar section forms Line 1, being taken up by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) during the first phase of the project. There are three lines being taken up in the first phase.
The section has been constructed at a cost of Rs 270 crore, Khurana said.
With four stations, the section would serve densely-populated parts of the Capital and would be commercially viable, he said. Khurana said another 8.5 km section, between Trinagar and Rithala of this line, would become operational by March 2004.
Around 98 per cent of the civil works and about 80 per cent of the electrical work on the section had been completed, DMRC officials said. The deadline for completion of this section was September.
The section was to be inaugurated by September 25, Khurana said. Since the Prime Minister would be out of the country September 30, so October 2 had been chosen for the launch, he added.
Khurana, also the state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president, however, insisted that the inauguration of the line was not linked with the upcoming Delhi Assembly polls.
The 66 km first phase of the metro project is to be completed by September 2005. The Trinagar-Tis Hazari corridor forms part of the Shahdara-Barwala line (Line 1), the other two lines being executed in the first phase are the Connaught Place-Dwarka corridor (Line 2) and the Central Secretariat-Delhi University corridor (Line 3).
