Wait a little to ride the monorail
Trial runs fail to meet safety standards, forcing officials to postpone the opening of the service
MUMBAI: India’s first monorail service missed its September deadline because trial runs being carried out on the Chembur-wadala stretch failed to meet safety standards, officials of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) have said.
This means, that although the MMRDA has completed all civil and technical work for the project, including constructing stations and the ticketing system, the monorail will not be opened to public in October as well.
It has been more than a year since MMRDA started carrying out trials on the 8.8-km stretch of the monorail corridor. In July this year, the planning agency had even announced that the service would be opened to public in September. However, officials said the trials had not met the necessary reliability standards.
“There are some minor issues that were found during trial runs and need to be sorted out. We are aiming to achieve about 85%-90% reliability during the trials before starting the monorail. However, it is difficult to predict when that will be done,” said UPS Madan, MMRDA commissioner.
Interestingly, in early September, MMRDA officials had pulled up contractors L&T and Scomi Engineering for incomplete work. As per minutes of the review meeting, Madan and additional metropolitan commissioner Ashwini Bhide had criticised the contractors for failing to get adequate rolling stocks (monorail rakes), unsatisfactory civil works, a lack of safety measures and the recruitment of inexperienced staff, along with a few technical issues.
However, MMRDA officials said the service may be started in November if reliability standards are achieved soon. At present, Singapore-based Smart agency, which has been appointed independent assessor for testing and commissioning of the project, is carrying out the safety certification for the monorail corridor.
“We have finished work at stations, for the ticketing system and other infrastructure required to start the monorail is also in place. We are hopeful that the service will start in November,” said an MMRDA official, on the condition of anonymity.