Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan and his cabinet colleagues will meet the top brass of the Union railway ministry in what officials say is the biggest exercise till now to push ahead with some of Mumbai's most ambitious rail projects.
The meeting will concentrate on four major projects: the Churchgate-Virar and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus-Panvel elevated corridors, and the Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad and Mumbai-Nagpur high speed (bullet train) projects.
These projects, especially the two elevated projects, which were launched with great enthusiasm after the initial technical reports were accepted, have lost steam over the past few months, said officials, adding that the railway ministry is now desperate to get them back on track.
The railway ministry’s initial proposals were not acceptable to the state government as they involved the acquisition of a lot of private land. On the other hand, railway officials say the alternatives suggested by the government will cost more and make the projects difficult.
It is said that while the railway ministry approaches the projects from a purely engineering point of view, land acquisition remains a sticky point for the state government.
Officials said issues like land acquisition, rehabilitation of the people who will be displaced by the projects, and financial structuring of the projects, among other things, have seen their share of differences between the state government and the railway ministry.
For example, the officials pointed out, the Churchgate-Virar elevated project is now very different from what was envisaged in the technical report prepared by the Rail India Technical and Economic Services (RITES) and Systra, the Paris-based urban rail transport consultancy firm.
Chief Secretary JK Banthia, after a survey of the route, had recently asked the railway ministry to reduce the amount of private land that would be needed for the project.
“To reduce land acquisition, the alignment of the project has been tweaked,” said a senior railway official. “Now, the corridor will be underground from Oval Maidan to Mahalaxmi and become an elevated line till Bandra, before going underground again till Jogeshwari or Oshiwara. From there till Virar, it will be a mix of elevated and ‘at ground level’ structures. All this will increase the cost of the project and also make it tougher to build.”
Of the four projects, only the CST-Panvel corridor appears to be in a healthy shape ahead of the state government-railway ministry meeting. A project report prepared by the ministry has placed the alignment almost entirely on government land, nullifying the need to acquire a single ‘private legal structure.’
“Acquiring private legal structures in Mumbai is almost impossible,” said the official. “So, we have reduced that to almost nil in the CST-Panvel project. There are close to 250 hutments near Mankhurd that will need to be rehabilitated, but that should not be much of a problem.”
The two high-speed bullet train corridors — the Pune-Mumbai-Ahmedabad line, which was approved by the railway ministry, and the Mumbai-Nagpur line, which was requested by the state government — will also come up for discussion at the meeting.
“The High Speed Rail Corridor Corporation set up under the Rail Vikas Nigam Limited is fairly positive about the Pune-Ahmedabad line but the Mumbai-Nagpur line will require extensive study,” said the official.
At current prices, the Mumbai-Nagpur line — which will reduce travel time between Maharashtra’s summer and winter capitals to four hours from the current 14 hours — may cost Rs 60,000 crore, an amount railway officials believe will be difficult to recover even by the most optimistic of Public-Private Partnership models.
Officials said the meeting, which will be attended by top executives of every railway agency that has a stake in these projects, will help resolve all these thorny issues at one go.
The state has asked the Railways to study feasibility of the Mumbai-Nagpur “bullet train”. Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan sought a report after a presentation by German consulting firm Vossing .
The consultants proposed a 1,000-odd km high-speed network covering Mumbai-Navi Mumbai-Pune-Aurangabad-Nagpur-Beed-Nanded-Yavatmal-Wardha-Nagpur. With trains at a maximum speed of 350 kmph, the corridor is expected to cut Mumbai-Nagpur travel time from 11 hours (Duranto) to four hours. To be fully air-conditioned, the fare would be Rs 900-3,600.
State finance minister Jayant Patil, a strong advocate of the project, pushed for its implementation at the meeting. But sources said the Railways are not keen on the project, which is estimated to cost Rs 1.30 lakh crore.
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