Metro rail to cover India, says Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu

The biggest beneficiary of metro rail expansion would be the national capital. Metro rail would run for over 375 km in Delhi and its suburbs, including the 189.44 km already in operation under phase-I and II of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC).

Bengaluru, which already has a metro train running to a distance of 17 km, and Mumbai, with 11.4 km, have already got 97.4 km and 65.37 km respectively, sanctioned.

The Chennai metro rail network will grow in size by another 9.05 km, thanks to the urban development ministry that has already “responded positively” to extending the network to Tiruvottiyur via Wimco Nagar. Add the 43.54-km monorail project, a pet scheme of Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa that is under consideration, and the city will have sophisticated rail transport for 97.59 km once the projects get over, hopefully within the next decade.

But it does not stop there. Jayalalithaa has also announced a monorail project for Coimbatore. The mono Vs metro debate and the takeover of Chennai’s MRTS by CMRL (Chennai Metro Rail Limited) aside, Tamil Nadu should get a more state-of-the-art urban rail network in the coming years. However, mono and metro trains will not be luxuries to be availed of in metropolitan cities.

As a part of its ambitious urban transport development programme, both the incumbent BJP and the previous Congress-led UPA chose relatively smaller towns, like Hyderabad, Kozhikode, Nagpur, Thiruvananthapuram, Jaipur, Kochi, Pune and Lucknow, for providing either a metro or monorail network.