BHOPAL : Presently, Metro trains are running in six cities in India: Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi NCR, Bangalore and Jaipur.
Metro train projects are in various phases of implementation in five other cities: Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Lucknow, Kochi and Hyderabad.
The populations of all these 11 cities is higher than Bhopal’s, with Mumbai at the top of the heap with 1.2 crore residents and Kochi at the bottom, with a population of 21 lakhs. As against this Bhopal’s population is 17.98 lakh.
The Bhopal Metro Project will cost a whopping Rs 7,000 crore. A Japanese consortium will partly fund the project albeit with a rider – 30 per cent of the procurements for the project will have to made from Japanese companies.
The project is supposed to be completed in two years but given the time overruns plaguing government projects; one can safely assume that it will take much longer. And so, Bhopalis should brace themselves for years of construction work, involving traffic snarls and high levels of pollution. Trees will be felled, building will be demolished and the entire city will be dug up.
The million dollar question is that does Bhopal really need a Metro. Free Press solicited the views of the denizens of the city on the need and viability of the project.
A section of citizens feel that if Metro is introduced in Bhopal, it will not be viable for several reasons. To begin with, the train will have to halt every two or three minutes. Since it will cover only the city, its financial viability would be doubtful. To make it viable, it will have to be extended up to Vidisha, Obaidullaganj, Berasia, Bairagarh and Mandideep
The low-floor buses were introduced in the city with great fanfare. But the vehicle-users are hesitant to travel in them as they consider using public transport below their dignity. One cannot be sure if the Bhopalites – like their Delhi counterparts – will be able to overcome this reluctance.
Advocate Dr Rajesh Sharma said, “Bhopal has an undulating terrain while Delhi is plain and that will make the project very costly. Secondly, it is being introduced only for the Bhopal city which is spread over an area of hardly 40 sq kilometers. And finally, the trains will run only on the trunk routes and people will have to walk to reach their destinations. So they will prefer using their own vehicles.”
Sikha Sharma, a teacher in DPS said, “Parents, if they avail school conveyance services, have to drop at and pick up their wards from bus stops. So, parents prefer vans to buses as vans pick up and drop children at their doorsteps. The same mindset will come in the way of people using Metro trains.”
Legal-social activist Rajesh Nema, however, has a different take. He said, “People are reluctant to travel in low-floor buses as they feel it below their dignity. Metro train will break this social perception. In Delhi, metro has done a miraculous job. People will start using metro instead of cars.”
Anuragni Dhangar, who teaches in St Francis School, said, “The low-floor buses have no fixed timings so people do not use them. If Metro will maintain the timings, people of all walks of life will definitely use it.”
RTI activist Ajay Dubey said, “The state government should make the present transport facilities (low-floor buses) more effective and sustainable. Metro is a luxury our city can ill-afford.
