Airport Metro corridor to resume operations in two months, hopes Government

July 7, 2012 | National News | Written by

New Delhi, July 7: A day after deciding to suspend operations of the 16-month-old Delhi Airport Metro Express, the Government on Saturday claimed that the high-speed corridor would resume services in two months, after necessary repairs.

Urban Development Secretary Sudhir Krishna told the reporters here that the decision to halt the operation of the metro was taken to undertake the repairs.

“When the train is moving then the repair would not be possible and repair would not be giving effective results. Therefore, the Reliance (Infrastructure) have considered it desirable to close the operations and look for solutions,” said Krishna.

Krishna said that a team of experts would start reviewing the line and there are chances of the operations resuming from second week of August this year.

Chief of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), Mangu Singh said that it was important to fix the technical snag at the earliest, as they cannot compromise with the safety of the passengers.

The fault is a small one, but ” it is grave from the safety perspective. We are going to have a detailed examination of the fault,” Singh said.

The officials said that out of the 2100 bearings, there is need to repair 230 of them.

Meanwhile, chief of Infrastructure of Reliance Infra, Sumit Banerjee dismissed the reports of the line being closed down owing to the loss incurred by the company.

“This line is not making any profit ; that is clear. I am not going to mislead you and say it is making profit. But then I can tell you about 100 public-private-partnerships, in India as well as abroad, globally, which are not making profits and there are solutions found to those. …..This decision is purely linked to its safety and operations of the line and no way connected to the finances of the line,” Banerjee said.

The 23-kilometer Airport Metro Express connects Connaught Place with the new Terminal-3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

Built at a cost of about rupees 57 billion, the line has six stations, and each coach has LCD screens showing flight information for the convenience of travellers while half the compartment of every six-coach train is reserved for luggage.

The Airport Metro fare ranges between rupees 20 and rupees 100.

The corridor is the first in the country to come up on the Public-Private-Partnership mode with Delhi Metro being responsible for the civil work, while Reliance Infrastructure is to operate the line for 30 years and share the revenues. (ANI)