Reconsider Aarey, Kanjurmarg metro car shed will spell doom: Centre to Maha govt

The integrated Metro depot site of Metro lines 3, 4 and 6 at Kanjurmarg. File pic/Ashish Raje

A Metro car depot at Kanjurmarg will delay the mass transmit lines in the city and hit punctuality of services on Lines 3 and 6 when implemented, the Centre has said, urging the Maharashtra government to reconsider its decision of scrapping the car shed at Aarey. Sunil Kumar, under secretary to the Government of India, has written to the state's chief secretary in this regard.

In a 3-page letter on March 17, Kumar cited meetings between the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the Maharashtra chief secretary on September 23, 2021 to stress that the progress of Metro 3 has been severely hampered due to the change in plan over the depot. Once completed, Metro 3 will run from Colaba to Seepz in Santacruz.

The Centre said there will be a lot of operational and maintenance constraints with the plans of a common depot for 2 or more lines at Kanjurmarg, pointing to observations made by DMRC & M/s SYSTRA, the consultant of MMRDA. The BJP-led government in Maharashtra had chosen Aarey as the car shed site, but it was scrapped after Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray became CM.

"DMRC has recorded their own experience that including trains from the depot consistently at a frequency of 4 minutes continuously for 3 or more hours is a challenging task. There is a compromised time of maintenance window due to running of line 3 trains for 7.5 km on Line 6 network up to Kanjurmarg. This will also have an adverse impact on restoration time in the event of failure of line 3 trains during regular operation period. There is sub-optimal utilisation of trains as at least two trains are to be kept as hot standby at SEEPZ village station," said the letter.

Kumar added in the letter, "100% punctual operation throughout the trips all the time in a day is rarely possible in real life operations as a lot of factors affect train movement. Any deviation in train moment will lead to detention at line 3 and 6 connections while transferring the trains between l3 and 6. Thus detention of trains mid section seems real and unavoidable." The Metro 6 line is planned from Jogeshwari to Kanjurmarg.

Pointing to involvement of huge investments, the Centre said "the proposed integration of two lines at SEEPZ village station will be a permanent risk to reliable train operations of both lines". Kumar said in his letter, "It is suggested that the decision of integrated depot to be taken only if absolutely unavoidable even with possible mitigation measures/optimisations in the present plans at Aarey." Kumar said Aarey is sufficient to meet the current as well as design life traffic requirement up to 2055.

"In this background and findings in DMRC report Government of Maharashtra is requested to reconcider their decision to shift the depot of line 3 from Aarey colony to Kanjurmarg. Government of Maharashtra is requested to allow restart of the depot work of Line 3 at Aarey colony for expeditious completion of the project of public interest with due exploration of possible optimisation in the present plans of depot at Aarey itself," said Kumar.