Mumbai: Metro and other infrastructure work in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) has come to a halt due to the lockdown. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) released an official statement on Wednesday, saying: " Only essential activities like curing, securing sites against any damage due to inactivity are in progress.
No other major activities are going on." Importantly, it also instructed contractors to pay full wages to labourers even when work was not possible.Similarly, the spokesperson from the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited (MMRCL), which is responsible for the underground Metro 3 (Colaba- -SEEPZ--Bandra) line, has clarified that only necessary and inevitable activities such as instrument monitoring of buildings and ground operations of the Tunnel Boring Machines in slow and degraded mode, where unavoidable, etc will be carried out until further orders from the state government.
Workers and engineers involved in these essential activities will be strictly adhering to the guidelines issued in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, the MMRDA agreed that project timelines in these difficult times of war against the virus were going to be adversely affected and completion would be delayed. By how long though? Only time will tell, it hinted through Twitter.
The MMRDA was supposed to make lines 2A (Dahisar-DN Nagar) and 7 (Dahisar E-Andheri E) operational by the end of this year. But now, these deadlines will be pushed forward, burdening the state exchequer, as project costs are likely to escalate, according to officials.
Apart from the metro, the other big-ticket infrastructure projects that will be affected are the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL), the Versova-Bandra Sea Link, Mumbai Augmentation (Missing Link) and the Samruddhi Corridor. Plans to procure 10 new rakes for the monorail too have been stalled.
