Pune Metro becomes India’s fastest metro project developed in just 30 months.

The first trial conducted by Pune Metro earlier this month was the fastest one to achieve the milestone (30 months) of the country’s metro projects. With the January-10 run being a precursor to technical trial runs and regulatory approval and certification, progress is on track to make the first 5 km stretch to be operationalized in April this year. The entire Rs 11,420-crore project will likely to be completed by March 2022 that consists of two corridors of 31.25 kilometres in length.

The Pune Metro is being developed by the Metro Rail Corporation Ltd named (Maha Metro), a 50:50 JV of the Centre and the Maharashtra government. Its first 16.589-km long corridor will extend from PCMC to Swargate which would have five subway stations and nine elevated stations. The second, 14.665-km long corridor would extend from Vanaaz to Ramwadi and have 16 stations.

The first corridor trails will take two to three months and the second corridor will start in the next two months, says Dr Brijesh Dixit, MD of the Maha Metro. After a long period of a slowdown last year in accordance with the elections in May and November – project work began in December 2016 and a long period of rainfall during non-seasonal times, construction has again gained momentum with tunnelling beginning on the five kilometres underground that links Shivaji Nagar with Swargate also the work has been speeding up for the overground routes on Corridor-I and Corridor-II.

The Pune Metro project obtained an approval stamp from the new government of Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi, which has given a breath of relief to Pune residents, who are suffering from traffic congestion regularly. In this approval, it has announced scrapping the Rs 5,000 crore of the city’s High Capacity Mass Transit Route project in its present type and putting into cold storage for the Pune-Mumbai futuristic Hyperloop project.

Moreover, one of the first things that Eknath Shinde, Minister for Urban Development, did when he took over the charge was to review the Pune Metro project. Shinde also said that the government would take all expansion plans for the city into consideration, in addition to ensuring the execution of such infrastructure projects ahead of schedule. Ajit Pawar, deputy CM, has expressed his interest in extending the Vanaaz-Ramwadi line to Wagholi via Chandni Chowk and extending both sides of PCMC-Swargate road.

While Pune Metro aims to run its first stretch in the next few months, Maha Metro wants to enter Pune’s real estate business with some 10 million sq.ft of commercial space across the 30 Metro stations situated on both corridors. According to Dixit “over 50% of Pune Metro’s revenues would be generated from non-tariff sources to ensure the project’s financial viability”.