Mumbai: By the end of this month, there will be nine rakes snaking under the western suburbs, from Goregaon to Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), as the city’s first underground Metro gears up to begin trial runs — a crucial step before operationalising the first phase of Mumbai’s first and only underground Metro railway corridor.
The 33.5-km corridor from Colaba to Seepz via BKC is among the city’s big-ticket infrastructure projects and has suffered long delays.
The first phase of the Colaba-Bandra-Seepz Metro will be a 12.44-km stretch comprising ten stations from Aarey Colony in Goregaon, where the Metro car depot is located, to the BKC business district.
“Overall work of Phase-1 from Aarey to BKC is 93 percent completed. We are making efforts to commence trials by the end of November,” Ashwini Bhide, MD of the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC), told ThePrint.
The second phase of the project, from BKC to Colaba, will be operationalised six months after the first phase is opened for public use, according to information from the MMRC.
The entire Colaba-Bandra-Seepz corridor, work on which began in 2016, has faced several controversies and delays, the most prominent one involving the location of the car depot. The proposal for a car depot at Aarey — considered Mumbai’s ‘green lung’ — stirred protests by a section of citizens in 2019. The issue also became a political hot potato between the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), which was opposed to the Aarey location, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was in favour of it.
The Metro line is crucial as it will link several of Mumbai’s commercial hubs such as Seepz, BKC, Andheri, Lower Parel and Cuffe Parade, besides improving connectivity to the Mumbai airport.
While the original cost of the project was Rs 23,136 crore, in August last year, the state cabinet reportedly approved another Rs 10,000 crore for the project.
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Trial runs
An MMRC official said the corporation has received all nine rakes required for Phase-1 operations. The first train arrived in Mumbai in August 2022 and the MMRC got the delivery of the ninth and final train on 4 November. The rakes were manufactured at Sri City Andhra Pradesh and are currently stabled at the Aarey Metro car depot.
The MMRC had conducted a short trial run at Sariput Nagar in Aarey after the arrival of the first rake.
Last month, the MMRC hit a major milestone when it tested train movement on a 17-km stretch from MIDC to Vidyanagari to Seepz.
The above-mentioned MMRC official told ThePrint that the train movement was to test the infrastructure including “the tracks, overhead contact system, rolling stock, fitment structure, the trackside infrastructure, platform screen doors”.
“Overhead electrification was charged to 25 KV for this purpose and the train successfully moved on the designated route. The train movement is a crucial activity before the commencement of actual trials,” the official added.
The MMRC is now hoping to start trial runs by the end of this month as per the criteria laid down by the Research Design & Standards Operation (RDSO), an arm of the Ministry of Railways that functions as a technical advisor and consultant to the Railway Board.
Once the RDSO trials are concluded, the MMRC will approach the Commissioner of Metro Rail Safety to test the rolling stock and grant a final safety certification to the corridor.
All other works related to the first phase will be substantially completed by December, said the MMRC official.
Aarey depot work at 83%
The location of the car depot for Mumbai’s first underground Metro corridor has been a subject of controversy for more than a decade now.
When the project was first planned more than a decade ago, the state government provisionally decided to go ahead with the site at Aarey colony for a car depot.
In April 2012, during a public meeting to hear suggestions and objections on the project, a city-based environmentalist objected to the site of the proposed car shed, but the cause to save Aarey did not gain momentum until 2015. Although in 2014, the then government of the Congress and the undivided Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had conducted a groundbreaking ceremony for the project with the car depot proposed at Aarey.
In 2020, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), comprising the then undivided Shiv Sena and NCP and Congress, took a policy decision to scrap the Aarey car depot and shift the location of the car shed to Kanjurmarg.
Two years later, the Shiv Sena split. The rebel faction led by Eknath Shinde joined hands with the BJP to form a government in Maharashtra. The new government, with Shinde as CM, in its very first cabinet meeting reversed the previous MVA government’s decision and shifted the car shed back to Aarey.
The issue of tree-cutting at Aarey was embroiled in a court battle, and the Supreme Court gave the MMRC permission to hack trees there for the car depot only in April this year.
According to information from the MMRC, about 83 percent of the work on the Aarey car depot was completed as of 31 October.
A second official from the MMRC said there is a stretch of a few metres that connects the car depot to the Metro corridor where work is still lagging behind.
As for the second phase of the project — from Bandra Kurla Complex to Colaba — the overall progress stands at 80 percent, with half of the mainline track works and systems-related works already completed.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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