A look at the Mumbai Monorail as it completes a year

While the ambitious Wadala-Chembur monorail corridor of Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) completes a year on Sunday, the monorail's journey has not been up to the mark so far. MMRDA while opening the line for operations had thought that it will be a huge success but with the regular technical glitches coming into the way of operations the authorities are struggling a lot.

According to MMRDA officials, the monorail ridership has crossed the 50 lakh mark in the last week of January which means that an average of around 14,000 people took a ride on monorail daily in the last one year.

The worrying is the fact that the ridership has not been as expected by MMRDA. The phase-1 of the monorail between Wadala-Chembur was thrown open for public in February 2014 an in just close to eleven months the technical problems that the monorail services have started facing also raises a big question about the fact that will the trains be able to operate without any technical glitches when the entire Jacob Circle Wadala Chembur line will be operational. It should be noted that at present the number of people using the monorail in phase-1 is not that good as the train passes through isolated and less populated areas.

Experts also feel that once the entire Jacob-Circle-Wadala - Chembur monorail operation starts then the readership will increases by more than two to three times that of the present readership and that time it will be a really test for the monorail. Looking at its past experience the experts feel that it would stickup to the expectations of passengers.

In the month of November the services were affected due to technical issues because of which MMRDA-Scoomi had to cancel around 20 monorail services between 4.30 pm to 6.30 pm.

It should be noted that monorail services have been facing many problems within few months of the services were started for public. It was also reported that how spare parts from new rakes were removed and replaced with those that were not working in the trains that were running on the Wadala Chembur corridor

Despite the problems faced by monorail, MMRDA-Scoomi authorities are happy with the overall performance of the phase-1. Speaking to mid day MMRDA official said, "The monorail is a new mode of transport which we are having for the first time in our country and so it is true that we are facing some issues during the operations but it's a learning experience. We have already instructed the company looking after the operations that such problem should not occur and the implementation of the same has already begun. At present the success percentage of the monorail operations is 85 per cent and over the period of time it will improve."

MMRDA claims that at present there are 15 rakes in Mumbai of which 10 are in running condition. However according to Scoomi authorities said that there are overall six trains available for Phase-1 operations.

MMRDA is confident that it will complete the work on the monorail phase two by 2015 end and the line will be thrown open for public by end of 2015.

The Constant Velocity Joint problem of the spare part has been one of the major issues that the monorail has been facing from long time. As it takes time to get Constant Velocity Joints from abroad the same parts from the trains that are not in operations were removed and fitted in the trains that are operational. The spare parts like bolts and nuts were purchased from local market.