Mumbai: For the third time in a month, Mumbai’s monorail, which has been criticised often for being a ‘white elephant’ since the time it was commissioned, broke down Monday, leaving passengers stranded for a while and disrupting services.
The Maha Mumbai Metro Operation Corporation Limited (MMMOCL), which oversees the operations of the monorail, in a statement said that a technical snag in the train caused it to halt mid-track. There were 17 passengers onboard who were transferred to another train and taken to the next station by about 7.40 am, the statement added.
Another statement from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said the incident was reported at 7.16 am that a train had halted between the Anthill and GTB Nagar monorail stations, and services were fully restored by 8.50 am.
The incident follows two similar incidents less than a month ago in August when monorail trains were halted mid-track due to power failures, impacting 1,148 passengers in all.
The Mumbai monorail has had a rough ride since its inception. The corridor was initially criticised for being badly-planned, leading to poor ridership, impacting its maintenance. The line draws a daily ridership of about 18,000-19,000 passengers, a far cry from the glossy estimates of 1.25-3 lakh passengers a day, and there have been several operational glitches similar to Monday’s incident along the way.
The project has also been bleeding money in the form of operational costs and maintenance expenditure, while ticketing revenue remains low.
Figures from the MMRDA’s budget books show that in FY 2024-25, the monorail recorded Rs 8.81 crore in revenue from the sale of tickets as against an estimated Rs 14.89 crore. The expenditure on its operation and maintenance that year alone was Rs 60 crore.
In the year before, in FY 2023-24, the monorail’s ticketing revenue was Rs 10.02 crore while the expenditure on its operation and maintenance was Rs 105.93 crore.
Similarly, in FY 2022-23, the ticketing revenue was Rs 7.50 crore, while the operation and maintenance expenditure stood at Rs 89.15 crore.
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SOP to address overcrowding, technical glitches
On Monday, when the train halted due to a technical failure, as per the standard procedure, the authorities brought a train on the parallel track, put a walkway connecting the two trains in place and evacuated stranded passengers.
For more complicated rescues, the monorail doesn’t have its own full-fledged disaster management mechanism and has to rely on the Mumbai fire brigade.
MMRDA officials said there’s often a delay by the fire officials in responding to monorail emergencies, like for the two incidents that happened in August.
The first of the two incidents, near Mysore Colony station, was more severe where it took nearly three-and-a-half hours to rescue 582 stranded passengers. The rake had broken down on a bend in the track, and the Mumbai fire brigade had to assist in evacuation efforts. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), the implementing agency for the monorail project under which the MMMOCL has been set up, attributed the failure to overcrowding. The train weighed four tonnes more than the permissible limit, it said.
In the second incident that month, a train carrying 566 commuters broke down near the Acharya Acre station.
In the Mysore colony incident, the second that month, a monorail rake got stuck on a turn. Seventy percent of the rake was tilted to one side and a rescue operation using a parallel train and a walkway would have proved to be dangerous, an MMRDA official who did not wish to be named said, adding that the fire brigade reached over an hour after the first call.
“Since the electric supply was affected, we had to rely on the monorail train’s battery to operate the air-conditioning and the lights. The battery eventually drained. Because the fire brigade arrived late, it delayed the entire rescue operation,” the official told ThePrint.
Several passengers had complained of suffocation after the incident.
As per procedure, monorail authorities also placed a call to the Mumbai fire brigade. The above-mentioned MMRDA official said, even on Monday, the fire brigade arrived after the entire operation was over.
A fire department official who did not wish to be named said the department has always responded immediately. “They (MMRDA) are blaming us simply to hide their own failures. They should focus on why they have so many glitches on the monorail so frequently. Also, as per the SOP, the monorail authorities should place a call to the fire department immediately but more often than not it is the passengers who alert us first.”
After last month’s incidents, the MMRDA constituted a high-power committee to probe the incidents in August and even suspended two officials, pending an inquiry. It also put in place certain fresh guidelines to address issues related to overcrowding and technical glitches.
The MMRDA said each train has a fixed carrying capacity of 102-104 tonnes and passenger entry will be regulated more strictly. It also decided that every train will have a dedicated security guard as well as a trained technician onboard. It put in place a schedule for comprehensive technical checks of all its rakes on a daily basis, and also tested the eight ventilation windows in its trains—two in each coach—to ensure they are emergency-ready.
“Enforcing these protocols sometimes leads to delays as passengers refuse to vacate the train in case of overcrowding. We ensure that we don’t start the train from the station till our security staff gets the excess passengers off board,” the MMRDA official said.
The official added, the overcrowding, though unfortunate, shows that there is a demand for the monorail now. “It services a route where typically it is difficult to get taxis and there are fewer bus routes.”
The bumpy ride since inception
Construction of the monorail began under the watch of the then Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government in 2009, but the project was marred by inordinate delays. The first phase of 8.8 km from Chembur to Wadala began operations in 2014, while it took another five years for the entire corridor, right up to Sant Badge Maharaj Chowk (Jacob Circle), to be completed. The entire 19.5-km corridor was pegged at Rs 2,700 crore.
Initially, the monorail corridor was being used more as a joyride with ridership typically spiking on weekends. When the second phase was made operational, a few more populated neighbourhoods were connected by the monorail map and ridership picked up a notch.
However, by then, the monorail started facing issues with maintenance and lack of spare parts, among others. The MMRDA eventually terminated its contract with the consortium of Larsen & Toubro and Malaysia’s Scomi Engineering, which built the monorail and were in charge of running it. It cited contract breaches and the poor quality of monorail services.
The MMRDA, however, initially struggled to procure spare parts because of limited domestic experience in monorail parts and rakes, and hence services kept being hit. It started sourcing spare parts locally and refurbishing trains.
In November 2017, monorail services on the Chembur to Wadala line were suspended after an empty train caught fire near the Mysore Colony station and an inquiry was set up. Services resumed only after nine months. The MMRDA is now planning an overhaul of the monorail’s operation and maintenance. The above-mentioned official said, earlier, the operation and maintenance of the monorail were done by two separate teams.
In July this year, it floated a tender for a contract worth Rs 297.04-crore to engage a private company to oversee the operations and maintenance of the monorail for a longer duration of five years. It has also secured 10 new rakes for the monorail, hoping to increase frequency of services. Of these, it has received the delivery of seven. However, these are yet to be commissioned for use, awaiting safety certifications.
(Edited by Saksham Thakur)
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