Lack of political will rendering suburban railway a non-starter: Activists

Veena G | NT

Bengaluru: Nearly a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the suburban rail in Bengaluru the muchneeded project has hardly progressed, rue activists. ‘“Forty years were lost in this discussion. In 40 months, we will fulfil your dreams,’ the PM had assured when he launched the project.

However, the pace at which the progress is happening, it will only be much later that we will get a suburban railway in the city,” according to Rajkumar Dugar of Citizens4Citizens (C4C). “As per the PM’s public commitment, all four corridors will be completed in 40 months. But seeing how things are going currently, we will be very very surprised if even one corridor gets finished by then,” he told News Trial.

Airport corridor and BMRCL The airport corridor is very crucial to reduce traffic congestion in the city and around the airport. C4C came up with a list of 21 reasons why it is important to complete the airport corridor of the suburban rail project on a war footing. One of the reasons is that once Terminal 2 of Kempegowda International Airport is fully operational, the capacity of the airport will double, and there will be a substantial increase in passenger footfall.

Dugar said “negative intervention” is causing the delay in the completion of the airport corridor. He said, “The union government has asked to finish it in 30 months. After the sanction letter came here, the media carried a story saying that the corridor has been deprioritised at the state government level. It has come out in the public domain that the negative intervention was from the BMRCL because they were building their own airport corridor. They began to believe that it would not be viable to have two corridors.”

Prof Ashish Verma, Civil Engineering, IISc, echoed this when he said, “When the metro was started, the BMTC was always concerned that its ridership and revenue would go down. When K-Ride came into the picture, metro started saying that that would impact their ridership and revenue. The whole airport line was pushed to a low-priority project because the metro construction is happening and somehow the thinking prevails that the metro construction should happen first.” However, areas covered by the BMRCL and K-Ride are different.

Dugar said that the BMRCL will serve one part of the city – from the Central Silk Board, which is at the south-eastern periphery of the city, and goes along the northern areas. While, the suburban railway starts from the heart of the city – the central railway station. This goes to Malleswaram, Yesvantpur and then to the airport terminal. These are two different parts of the city and should ideally have complemented each other to help the city commuters.

“Considering that you have a railway line very close the airport where the halt station is, an extension to the airport could be easily created to quickly connect the suburban railway even while the metro corridor is under construction. Both modes will become feasible, there is no competition actually. This is all because we need people to reduce using cars and taxis," added Prof Verma.

Srinivas Alavilli, WRI Fellow with Integrated Transport and Road Safety, said, “For a city like Bengaluru, you require metro, bus and suburban railway. You require them all. It also depends on your planning – if you have a rail line to the airport, you want to focus on the suburbs – because the railway line to the airport existed for 100 years before the airport even existed. So if you had planned properly, the day the airport was thrown open, suburban railway trains to the airport should have been started."