Study on setting up new suburban railway lines

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) wrote to the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MRVC) last week to study the prospects of setting up new suburban railway lines or add additional tracks on 10 routes in the MMR. Many of these 10 are new routes, with no railway infrastructure in place.

Chief operations officer, MRVC, Prakash Rao Vazalwar, said, “The authority has asked us to do a Comprehensive Traffic Study (CTS) for 10 proposed suburban rail projects.” The MRVC is, however, unsure about who will finance the study. Since it is not a part of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project, funds cannot be sought from the World Bank.

As per procedure, the MRVC will have to first carry out a technical feasibility study that will assess the possibility of undertaking the CTS. Vazalwar said that the MRVC will work out the funding aspect in its correspondence with MMRDA. He also stated that he cannot give any estimate of how much the study will cost.