Bangalore?s most prominent thoroughfare, MG Road, is getting spruced up for an event that?s been a long time in the coming. Nearly 17 years, that is.
The euphoria over the launch of the Bangalore Metro with its swanky stations is unmistakable in the city, whose reputation for software prowess and traffic snarls is equally legendary. For, it?s the Diwali gift that promises to usher in a bit of change for Bangalore?s commuters, who?ve not just waited patiently, but also borne the highest petrol price in the country to help pay for it.
The Namma Metro (Namma is ?our? in Kannada), which Union minister for urban development and road transport Kamal Nath will unveil on Thursday morning is just a small piece of the entire project. Nath will kick-off commercial operations on the the first seven kilometres along a section from MG Road to the city?s eastern locality of Byappanahalli.
Still, covering that distance in 15 minutes and not being left at the mercy of peak hour traffic is certainly an appealing prospect, even in a city that was the first in India to upgrade to air-conditioned Volvo buses for city routes.
The Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL) hopes to complete the entire 42.3 kilometres of the metro line that comprises two corridors crisscrossing each other at the heart of the city by 2013.
?The metro project will hopefully decongest the road traffic to some extent,? Karnataka chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda said on Tuesday, voicing a hope that most Bangaloreans carry. To add to the excitement of novelty, a bicycle sharing service to complement the metro was launched this week by a private company, while SBI is offering ATM-cum-transit cards to pay for the train rides.
The centre?s approval for a R6,395 crore Namma Metro came in 2006 (cost overruns and route extension have nearly doubled the original projections to R11,609 crore now). But various governments in Karnataka had been mulling over an Elevated Light Rail Transport System (ELRTS) since 1994, touted then as among the country?s first privately promoted projects of the kind. In the late 1990?s, the government also levied a surcharge on petrol in Bangalore to help pay for it.
However, the project, awarded to a consortium led by Vijay Mallya?s UB Group, was shelved in 2002 after much debate over the private-funded model and utility of a light train service.
Then the Namma Metro was mooted, with the state and Centre pitching in with equity and subordinate debt to meet 55% of the cost, and the rest coming from senior term debt.
?I am happy to say we completed earlier than the Delhi Metro,? BMRCL?s managing director N Sivasailam was quoted as saying earlier this week. With Bangalore?s famed tree
cover fast vanishing to make way for its growing vehicle population, the good news will indeed get better when the
rest of the metro line gets going.