Of many Metros planned

Many cities across India are racing to build metro rail systems to ease traffic congestion. In the Metro Rail World 2011 meet held in May 2011, it was said that 4000km of new subway tracks would be added in India. In all in the country, metros would be running in eight more cities. While the metro is under construction in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, metro rails are being planned in Pune, Lucknow, Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Kochi, Indore and Chandigarh. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) chief E Sreedharan had earlier mentioned that the Kerala government had cleared the metro rail project in Kochi and handed it over to DMRC on a turnkey basis. On Hyderabad metro, he said the state still wanted to go for a build, operate and transfer (BOT) mode involving the private sector. Under a turnkey project, a developer constructs the project and is sold or turned over to a buyer in a ready-to-use condition. Punjab government in June 2011 had approved the detailed project report for the Ludhiana metro rail project. The cabinet had permitted the execution of the project through public-private partnership or BOT model. The metro projects that are under construction include Delhi Metro that has completed 65 km of phase one and when both phase 1 and 2 are ready, Delhi Metro will stretch to 120km. In Bangalore, 42.3 km kilometers of metro rail is under construction under phase 1 of the project and another 51km is planned under the phase 2. While Mumbai Metro line 2 (Charkop-Bandra-Mankhurd) of 32 km is under construction, 21.14km of metro rail project is being planned for Navi Mumbai Metro (phase 1, 2 and 3). The other cities where metro projects are under construction include Jaipur (28.5km) and Hyderabad (71km). Nearly 40km length metro rail is planned for Pune, 25km for Kochi, 24km for Lucknow. On the other hand, metro in Gujarat will provide link between Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad of 100km length. Plans are afoot to have 15.79 km of metro rail in Ludhiana.