The Trinamool Congress wants the East-West Metro corridor project to be transferred from the Union urban development ministry to Railways.
Sudip Bandopadhyay, the chief whip of Trinamool Congress(TMC) in the Lok Sabha, today took up the issue in Parliament. He tried to point out that lots of people are being displaced and houses demolished and that the project was not being properly handled. “The Union urban development minister S Jaipal Reddy has said that the department will address these complaints,” informed Saugata Roy, minister of state for Urban development.
The net land requirement for the metro corridor is around 22.6 Hectares(Ha), of which 21.52 Ha is government land and the remaining 1.08 Ha is private land. The number of project-affected persons is 432 and the state government has already worked out a rehabilitation plan for them. Trinamool Congress leader and Railways minister, Mamata Banerjee, had earlier argued that the state government would not be able to handle “sensitive issues” related to the project.
Industry observers said, Banerjee was keen to bag all the brownie points from the Left Front government here in Bengal.
The ambitious project of the Union urban development ministry pegged at a cost of Rs 4,676 crore has been sanctioned by the Centre under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and proposes to link central Kolkata to its suburbs.
The government of India is funding Rs 1,169 crore for the project through equity and subordinated debt, while the state government is spending around Rs1,452.58 crore and the remaining Rs2,253 crore is coming from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as senior term debt loan. "In case the project is handed over to the Railways, the state government's share will remain," explained Roy.
When asked about the benefits of handing over the project to Railways, Roy said it was more sensible to have a uniform system for the city rather than having a north-south connectivity run by the Railways and the east-west connection run by another. "We can have a uniform gauge system for the metro in the city then", Roy said, who happens to be the minister-of-state in the urban development ministry.
If the Kolkata East-West Metro project is indeed handed over to the Railways, it can set a precedent for similar projects in other cities like Delhi and Bangalore.
The Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation(KMRC) has been incorporated as a joint venture company with equal equity participation from the state and central government in July last year. It has already started issuing work orders and tenders. Tender for sixthe 6 km elevated corridor at Salt Lake was awarded to Gammon India Ltd in February and work has already begun.
The 13.77 kilometer long route is expected be completed by 2015, that will connect the IT hub of the city in Salt Lake in the eastern fringes of the city to Howrah Maidan in the West. Of this, around 8 km is underground with six stations and the balance 5.77 km will be on an elevated track. The Empowered Group of Ministers on Mass Rapid Transit System, chaired by then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, had approved the extension of the project from Howrah station to Howrah Maidan last year. This extension would incur an additional expenditure of Rs 198 crore.
