Chennai Metro-MRTS Merger: PMO directs Railway Board to speed up the project
The Hindu
PMO directs Railway Board to accelerate Chennai Metro-MRTS merger project, addressing long-standing delays and commuter dissatisfaction.
The Prime Minister’s Office has directed the Railway Board to speed up the Chennai Metro-MRTS merger project.
This comes a few weeks after Chief Minister M.K. Stalin met Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the NITI Aayog meeting and gave a memorandum. Among the key priorities mentioned in it included ‘Transfer of Chennai’s MRTS to Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL).
“We understand that following that meeting, PMO has directed the Railway Board to accelerate work on this project. Subsequently, the Railway Board had asked three queries to the Southern Railways. We hope that the board gives an approval soon,” a source in Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA) said.
A senior official of Railways said, they have responded to all the queries raised by the board so far.
The takeover of MRTS by the CMRL has been discussed for over a decade now with no end in sight. CUMTA, which has been steering this project for a couple of years now, sent the proposal to the Railway Board in February 2024 and has been waiting for a response since then. CUMTA’s proposal indicates that MRTS has an operating cost of nearly Rs 104 crore a year and the revenue is nearly Rs 50 crore per year.
Sources said, the merger had been unnecessarily delayed for a long time now.
Commuters said that it is disappointing to see how this project has failed to take off for years now. Dayanand Krishnan, a resident of Tambaram, said, after witnessing the ease and comfort with which commuters can travel in Chennai Metro Rail system, they want the same comfort in other public transport systems as well.
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