Mumbai: Oshiwara station, a decade and counting...

July 31 marked 10 years of Oshiwara station's infamous status as an under-construction one.

It was way back in 2006 when a tender for the "consultancy services in architectural and structural design for proposed new land mark railway station building at 'Oshiwara' between Jogeshwari & Goregaon stations of Western Railway" was awarded. The tender was awarded by Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MRVC) which has been developing the station along with Western Railway. Another important player in the middle was the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

The station cleared its biggest hurdle on April 30 this year when the BMC managed to throw open to the public a Road-Overbridge (ROB) on the northern end of the station. This allowed the railways to close a level crossing that was dissecting the station's under-construction platforms right down the middle.

With the closure of the level crossing on May 6 this year, work to join the platforms started and that work, officials said, is still continuing and is expected to take another month. "The MRVC and WR started work in a smart way while the level crossing was open. While people were using the level crossing, the railways started construction on either side of the level crossing and by 2014 had managed to make significant progress. Both sets of platforms as well as the elevated booking office and station complex got completed. Unfortunately, the time taken to construct a ROB at the north-end of the station took so long that all time benefits were expecting from the ingenuous thinking at the beginning of the construction petered off," explained an official.

The station is now being seen as a landmark as far as bad coordination between the railways and state agencies like the BMC are concerned. "There was hardly any pro-activeness from the railways and the state when it came to approaching courts or getting stay orders obtained by project-affected people (PAP) vacated. The BMC passed the buck to the railways and the railways pushed it back onto the former," said an official.

"Ideally the railways should come out with a construction manual on the Oshiwara fiasco so that in future such pitfalls and lack of coordination can be avoided. Imagine if it takes 10 years to make an ordinary station like Oshiwara, when exactly do we see the first bullet train speeding on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad project? Not in another 2 decades I guess," said commuter Manish Chaturvedi sarcastically.