Focus on underground work, say experts

BANGALORE: Since its beginning, there has been much debate about the underground section of the Metro mass transit system in the city. While  BMRCL authorities are continuing to defend their stance, the town planning experts suggest that a better planning before beginning practical work would have sorted matters. “The daily progress of the underground tunnelling work should be going on at a pace of 15 metres per day. But they are able to complete only 5 to 8 metres of drilling. Only 40-45 per cent of the work is complete now. Although the project at K R Circle, Vidhana Soudha and Central College have picked up pace, overall only 25 per cent of the corridor is complete,” said M N Sreehari, Advisor to the State Government on Infrastructure, Traffic and Transport.Further, urban experts said that with delayed progress, costs escalate too. “With each day, the BMRCL stands to lose around `65 lakh. For a fully grown city like Bangalore, ideally the Metro should have been completely underground,” he observed.Ashwin Mahesh, ABIDe Member and an Urban Expert explained, “It is obvious that if the whole Metro is underground, the cost would escalate. The problem is not the money, but the financing. The government should proactively create a system where a project like this can borrow loans for a long period. There should be long term financing and banking system should introduce such products.” “They could focus on extension of construction of above ground work from Byappanahalli to Whitefield. There was a general notion that there is a delay only in the Reach 1, but somehow there is a staggering delay on other reaches too,” he said.