Japan’s team studies Metro rail project

Japan’s team studies Metro rail project
Deccan Herald

The mono rail lobby, which seems to have lost the race to metro rail group in the first phase, now wants to get its share in the second and third phases.

The Bangalore Mass Rapid Transit Limited (BMRTL) on Monday continued to take on the mono rail lobby in the alleged campaign by the latter against the Bangalore Metro Rail project.

BMRTL officials gave an appraisal of the project to a two-member fact-finding team from Japan Bank for International Corporation — an external funding agency for the project — and took them on an inspection tour of prominent alignment junctions along the Phase I route of the Bangalore Metro Rail.

The visiting Japanese officers are Manasari Yanagiuchi of the JBIC’s Development Assistance Department and Elsa Hatanaka of the JBIC’s Environment Analysis Department. Official sources said measures like terminating out station buses on City outskirts, offering a common ticketing system for metro rail and its feeder systems and public parking spaces in all metro rail stations were to be introduced at an appropriate time to promote public use of the system.

Latest campaign

But some of the measures such as ban on three-wheelers on select roads and entry tax for private vehicles on some roads were unlikely to go well with the public, they said. The latest campaign by mono rail group was about ensuring for it a pie along the second and third phase routes of metro rail and was not about disrupting the project’s Phase I — the construction work — which was slated to start in the last week July, sources told Deccan Herald.

The mono rail lobby was aware that the details of the route of the next two phases of metro rail will figure in the Comprehensive Survey on Traffic and Transportation in Bangalore expected to be ready in about eight months.

Prominent junctions

Shivajinagar, Hudson Circle and Koramangala are some of the prominent junctions expected to figure in the second phase, they added. In their bid to be heard before the metro rail work started, the mono rail group had also approached the Planning Commission and the Union Ministries of Urban Development and Finance, but to no avail, sources added.

MONO PLAN

Defamation suit

Bangalore, dhns: A defamation case against BMRTL managing director K N Srivatsava and DMRC adviser S N Venkata Rao is likely to be filed on Tuesday by Metrail India Pvt Ltd, the promoters of mono rail said. “Notices have been just sent to these officers, the case will be filed in

Bangalore on Tuesday,” Metrail director Rehan Khan said on Monday night.