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Green light for New Delhi metro
NEW DELHI, India -- Travellers in New Delhi are to be offered an escape from interminable traffic jams and road rage -- a new underground rail system. With its smart stations and sleek trains, officials say the new system will be more advanced than the Tokyo or New York subways and on a par with those of Singapore and Hong Kong. Stage one of the new New Delhi metro was officially opened Tuesday, Christmas Eve, by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was also given the honour of buying the system's first ticket. The plan is to lay about 240 kilometres (150 miles) of track, although the first stretch of the network to become operational runs for just over eight kilometres. The first section was being opened to the public on December 26. New Delhi is only the second Indian city to have a metro rail system, although the capital's network is considerably more high-tech than the one in the eastern city of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. The trains used on the network, built by a Japanese-Korean consortium, are comparable with those used on the world's most advanced metro systems. Initially around 60 train sets will be imported for the system, with a further 180 sets to be built in India itself. Long time comingThe idea of constructing an underground railway in the Indian capital was first mooted more than 50 years ago, but the project became mired in decades of bureaucratic wrangling.
In 1998 the project was finally given the go-ahead with stage one, consisting of about 62 kilometres of track connecting downtown New Delhi, scheduled for completion by 2005. In total the first phase has a projected cost of $1.7 billion. The system is seen as New Delhi best hope of easing the city's mammoth congestion problems and clearing the air in one of the world's most polluted cities. About four million vehicles, ranging from jam-packed buses to slow-moving bullock carts, cram the city's streets with thousands of new vehicles joining them every month. Just one car breaking down on a key route can cause gridlock for several hours. Planners estimate that the first phase of the project will carry around two million commuters a day with trains running every three minutes.
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