Delhi Metro Past and Present

Delhi, the national capital of India, has seen many cold winters. But the winter of 2015 was different. This time, the city, known for its rich heritage, not only saw a late arrival of winter but it also saw pollution levels rising to dangerous levels. The situation prompted the Supreme Court of India to exhort the state and Central governments to come up with a concrete plan to curb pollution levels.

Soon, the state government came out with a very controversial “even-odd scheme” for road rationing. A hullabaloo ensued, but Delhiites had a very reliable transport service at their disposal – the Delhi Metro, which has seen double-digit growth in its ridership ever since its inception. Like the city, Delhi Metro also has a history.

FOUNDATION

The foundation of Delhi Metro can be traced back to the ‘Study of traffic and travel characteristics of Delhi’ in 1969-70. It led to the commissioning of different committees to dwell on issues of which technology should be used, what kind of routes formulated and, above all, under who’s jurisdiction would it fall.

In 1984, the Delhi Development Authority and the Urban Arts Commission came up with a plan for developing a multi-modal transport system, which would consist of constructing three underground mass rapid transit corridors as well supplementing the city’s existing suburban railway and road transport networks.

And finally after 11 years, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), a state-owned company with equal equity participation from the Government of India and the Government of Delhi, was incorporated in May 1995 to create a metro system for Delhi and its satellite cities of Faridabad, Gurgaon, Noida and Ghaziabad. Mr. E. Sreedharan, who is popularly known as the “Metro Man,” was entrusted with the responsibility to make Delhi Metro a success story in the capacity of managing director.

The construction work on Delhi Metro started in 1998, and the development was divided into four phases spread over around 20 years. Phase I which targeted 65 km was completed in 2006 while Phase II that covered 125 km was completed in 2011. Phase III is expected to be completed by 2016, and Phase IV is scheduled to be completed by 2021. Phase V, though in the pipeline, is in the discussion stage.

CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

The first challenge of DMRC was to avoid political interference which is usually seen in a large scale project. The Government of India addressed this at the company formation level itself. It gave DMRC complete autonomy in all major matters, with financial powers vested in the managing director. But, in 2000, a dispute erupted. Mr. Sreedharan wanted to use coaches of standard gauge– used by metros globally – for Delhi Metro, while the Railway Ministry wanted to use broad gauge, like the rest of the rail network in India. The issue went to a group of ministers, which favoured the Railway Ministry. Finally, after long deliberations, the Metro Man agreed to the government’s demand and went ahead with the use of the broad gauge.

The second hurdle was preventing land acquisition challenges from disrupting the project. The Delhi Metro Railway (Operations and Maintenance) Act of 2002 came handy in taking care of this potential challenge. It superseded local municipal laws and barred lower courts from issuing stay orders. On its part, DMRC formed a legal team to handle land acquisition cases, and timely temporary accommodations were built for relocated people. But again, a couple of case took a long time to get sorted out.

Inconvenience to the general public as a result of construction was always expected. And, to take care of it, an action plan was formulated along with local civic agencies and police departments way ahead before the actual construction started. Thankfully, this never cropped up as an obstacle again.

But the mother of all challenges for DMRC was to get best-in-class technology, and for that international cooperation was required. DMRC employees were trained with the Hong Kong Metro Rail Transit Corporation. A global bidding program was adopted for the consultancy that resulted in project participation by multinational engineering firms from Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. Coach manufacturing technology was also transferred from a South Korean firm to Bharat Earth Movers Limited for manufacturing the metro cars for DMRC.

Signalling was another challenge that DMRC had to take care of because multiple lines were involved. To address it, Delhi Metro uses a centralised automatic train control system consisting of automatic train operation, automatic train protection and automatic train signalling modules. The technology and the equipment for the same have been provided by Motorola, Siemens Transportation Systems, and Bombardier Transportation.

COLLABORATION WITH CHINA

DMRC has collaborated with different Chinese firms during the making of Delhi Metro. The first cooperation was in 2010 with CSR Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive, a subsidiary of major Chinese train manufacturer CSR Corporation, to supply 15 metro cars to the Delhi Metro. For those who don’t know CSR, it is the world’s largest manufacturer of electric locomotives and is China’s leading bullet-train maker. Again in 2013, CSR supplied 21 cars to Delhi’s metro rail system.

Again in the same year, DMRC partnered with Shanghai Urban Construction Group (SUCG) for tunnelling. The engineers of SUCG were entrusted with the task of lowering a massive 300-tonne tunnel boring machine (TBM) into a crater that was once a park near the city’s main mosque – Jama Masjid in old Delhi. Later on, the engineers helped in building Delhi Metro’s 9.37 km Central Secretariat-Kashmiri Gate corridor, which is also called the Heritage Line because of its proximity to many monuments, construction of New Delhi Elevated Subway (viaduct) for the second phase of DMRC’s project, and, in 2009, in the construction of the tunnel section for the Delhi Metro Airport Express. To undertake the construction work, SUCG had formed a joint venture (JV) with Indian conglomerate L&T that has been awarded different projects by DMRC.

FUNDING

In Phase I, about 60 percent of the project cost was financed by the Government of Japan by way of a soft loan from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), now called the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

Acording to a spokesperson of DMRC, “The Central Government and the State Government jointly financed 28 percent of the project cost through equity contributions in addition to providing a subordinate loan to cover the cost of land acquisition which roughly worked out to 5 percent of the project cost. The balance of 7 percent funds were internally generated through property development.”

In the second phase of Metro construction, the JICA loan contributed 54.47 percent of the funding. While the equity from the Governments of India and Delhi increased to 16.39 percent each. For the construction of the Airport Express link, 39 percent was contributed by the Governments of India and Delhi and 46 percent by the concessionaire as this was the first ever project of the Delhi Metro on the public-private partnership model.

The total estimated expenditure for Phase III expansion is INR 41,079 crores. JICA is going to provide 48.57 percent of the total fund required while the Government of India and the Government of Delhi will pay 10.04 percent each.

WAY FORWARD

A study by Central Road Research Institute (CERI) says that the metro helped keep around 4 lakh cars off roads in 2014. The numbers may increase exponentially if the anti-pollution measure like ‘odd-even scheme’ is implemented in the city fully. Also with rising population, the ridership will only increase in future.

To meet the demands, Delhi Metro in 2016 plans to add around 114 km to its existing network that will include 18 new interchange stations. Also, by 2021 when DMRC completes Phase IV, the total length of Delhi Metro network would go up to 434 kilometres exceeding London’s 140-year-old Tube which has a length of 402 kilometres. With this, Delhi Metro will become the third largest metro network in the world after Shanghai (538 km) and Beijing (465 km).

Delhi Metro is also expected to strongly pitch for a fare revision owing to a significant rise in its operational costs. Currently, Mr. Mangu Singh had said that a fare hike is “long overdue.”

The author is a Delhi-based journalist and Managing Editor of the Mobile Indian, a personal technology new portal. And this article is exclusive to China-India Dialogue. Feel free to share this article. To reprint this article, please contact us for permission.