Thaindian News

Chandigarh, May 26 (IANS) As major roads in Chandigarh get clogged with ever-increasing traffic, a proposal is gaining ground for a Metro rail here. The Punjab and Haryana governments are chipping in for the project that will also link this city to adjoining Panchkula and Mohali towns.

Various agencies of the Chandigarh administration, the Punjab and Haryana governments, the railways, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) and technical institutes have held meetings in recent months to shape up the Metro project for the tri-city area.

The DMRC, which has successfully implemented the Metro-rail project in New Delhi, has assured that the detailed project report (DPR), along with the proposed financial model, would be submitted within six months.

A team of the DMRC and a government-sector infrastructure company, RITES, is coordinating with various agencies to finalise the proposal. The Metro project will have elevated and underground tracks.

Chandigarh, which has the highest density of population of motor vehicles in the country - nearly 800,000 for a population of 1.05 million people - is facing increased congestion on its roads.

The city, designed and founded by French architect Le Corbusier and his team in the 1950s to showcase an emerging, independent and modern India, was originally planned for a population of only 500,000 people.

“We are trying our level best so that a working Metro in the tri-city becomes a reality soon,” Chandigarh’s Finance Secretary V.K. Singh said after a recent meeting on the proposed project.

The ambitious project will see inter-governmental cooperation between the central government (Chandigarh is centrally -administered by the ministry of home affairs), the Punjab government and the Haryana government.

Sources here say the government in neighbouring Himachal Pradesh also wants the Chandigarh Metro to be extended till Baddi town, which is a big industrial area, in the hill state.

During the meetings, officials have decided that the Chandigarh Metro will mainly follow two routes.

The first route will run from the north to the south of the city and will start from a site close to Capitol Complex near the Punjab and Haryana civil secretariat, the high court and the Rock Garden.

It will reach the city’s commercial hub, Sector 17, through the UT Secretariat and move ahead through the busy areas of Sectors 22, 35 and 43 and enter Mohali town in adjoining Punjab to go up to the Aerocity, near the upcoming Chandigarh international airport.

The second route, called the East-West corridor, will start from Sector 21 in Haryana’s town of Panchkula and lead to Chandigarh’s railway station.

It will then cross Sector 17, the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) and the institutional area in Sarangpur and end at Mullanpur in Punjab where new residential and commercial project development is taking shape in a big way.

“We have requested the administration that the Metro should also be extended to Zirakpur town (in Punjab) so that more people could benefit from it,” a senior official of the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) told IANS.

Punjab and Haryana have offered 25 acres of land in their states to set up depots at the terminal points of the Metro project.

“The elevated section will have a station at every one kilometre and it will be at an average distance of 1.2 km in the underground portion,” V.K. Singh said.

(Jaideep Sarin can be contacted at jaideep.s@ians.in)