In what could add a new chapter in India’s transport history, the work for burrowing a tunnel beneath River Hooghly (Ganga) commenced for the first time in the country on Friday with the Metro Railway engineers starting the work to dig a tunnel which will join Kolkata and Howrah.
The work to construct a 520 metre tunnel beneath the riverbed will take about two months to complete, Metro sources said, adding the tunnel would run 26 metres beneath the river and its bed. The work began with deployment of a couple of boring machines which will dig about 13 metres of underwater tunnel on the first day.
Incidentally the City of Joy got the country’s first Metro project way back in the mid-eighties. The work is the part new Metro project called East-West Metro connecting Kolkata and Howrah. The current one runs from north to south. The two lines will converge at Central Metro Station.
The project which will run from Rajarhat to Howrah via Sealdah, a major railway station in the country, will descend further down past Dalhousie Square — the city’s main office district adjacent to one of Asia’s biggest wholesale market place Burrabazar — creating a 1,100 metre incline to go under the Hooghly, sources said.
The 14.67 km stretch would have 12 stations out of which six would be under ground and six elevated.
The Japan Bank of International Cooperation (JBIC) and Indian Railways were funding the phase two of metro railway expansion project which would cost around Rs 5,000 crore. It is likely to be completed in 2018.
Incidentally, a tunnel about six feet in diameter constructed in the British period runs beneath the Hooghly and carries the cable lines.