While the Heritage line of the Delhi Metro is on track to be opened to public before August 15, work on the Majlis Park-Shiv Vihar line (Pink line or line 7) and Janakpuri West-Botanical Garden (Magenta line or line 8) is also near completion and safety trials on a few stretches of these lines will start as early as in July.
“Out of the 56 km long Majlis Park — Shiv Vihar section, construction work of 54 kilometres have been completed. land has not been made available to DMRC at some pockets in Mayapuri, Naraina and Trilokpuri due to which some part of it may be delayed. But we will start operations in a few stretches of this line in this year itself,” said Mangu Singh, MD of DMRC.
Similarly on the 36 kilometre long Janakpuri West-Botanical Garden section, construction work of less than two km are still left, which will be completed soon.
Mangu said safety trials on Janakpuri West-IGI Airport stretch and Botanical Garden-Kalkaji stretch will be started in July this year. “The trials on the rest of the route, from IGI airport to Kalkaji, will also be started by September this year,” he added. The deadline for the completion of the line is December 2016.
On line 7, safety trials will start in October on Majlis Park-lajpat Nagar and IP-Extenstion-Shiv Vihar stretches. However, safety trials on lajpat Nagar-IP Extension stretch will start only by December, that is if the land on the contentious locations is provided to DMRC. This may postpone the opening of this stretch to next year. This line was also stated to be completed by December 2016.
“The construction work of Phase 3 is progressing satisfactorily and we should be able to complete the civil construction work and commence signaling trials on most of the stretches within this year. This new phase will have new trains and signaling technology called Communication Based Train Control (CBTC),” Dr Mangu said.
He further added that the construction work of Phase 3 has been more challenging than the first two phases because this time, bulk of the construction is taking place within the city while in the last phase, the corridors were primarily moving out of the city to the NCR areas. “The quantum of underground construction (55 kms) is also more than the underground work carried out in the last two phases. In terms of length also, the volume of work in Phase 3 is almost equal to the combined construction length of the first two phases,” he added.