Make metro indigenous project: Metroman

The brain behind building metro network across metro cities of the country, E Sreedharan, has called upon the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make Metro a complete Make in India project to bring down costs and benefit to commuters. The PMO has now sought views from the Union Urban Development Ministry (UD) on his insistence, which calls for complete indigenization of metro projects across the country. It was under Sreedharan’s leadership that metro became a reality in Delhi, besides running its rail network in the Capital, currently DMRC is also involved in consultancy and preparing feasibility reports for several ongoing projects, including Kochi and Jaipur. The average cost of an elevated metro comes to Rs.250 crore per km while that of underground metro is Rs.400 crore. Unless indigenization is taken up seriously and vigorously, it will not be possible to reduce cost of metro projects. While DMRC is self-sufficient in almost all aspects of construction, be it civil works, power supply and traction, there are two vital safety areas where it is still dependent on foreign manufacturers—signaling and telecommunications and automatic fare collection and the Metroman has sought to exploit the huge talent pool of hardware and software engineers of the country and the move will go a long way to cut costs, he said.