Metro projects in India cheapest in the world: Urban Development Secretary

Metro projects in India are the cheapest in the world due to availability of abundant manpower resources, according to Urban Development Secretary Sudhir Krishna.

 

"I discovered that our metro projects are the cheapest in the world. I am not able to make a solid claim because corporate data you have to collect," he said while speaking at an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Friday.

 

"The next highest is something that is 20 per cent more than us but generally 40 per cent more than Indian metro projects," he added.

 

He said that because of the high cost of wages, the general trend across the globe is that the entire project is handed to a single entity whose expertise is limited to only one or few components, as a result of which the costs rise.

 

While India does not manufacture all the components, the key lies in its large population which allows it to deploy more people in a project, the Urban Development Secretary further said.

 

"...this is a strength. Because we can break the project into different components and then bid for different components and you get the best possible competitors who are experts in those fields, whether it is the signaling system or the rolling stock or whether it is the construction of the civil structure," Mr Krishna said.

 

"We must capitalise on the manpower resource which we have."

 

He said the PPP documents for urban projects should be formulated in such a way that they have inbuilt flexibility to meet all future eventualities.

 

Mr Krishna also noted that after India acquired Independence, the focus was on "ruralisation" because of which the urban infrastructure received less attention. Urbanisation has gathered pace in India and, at present, the trend is that small and mid-sized cities are growing at a faster pace, he said.

 

While there is much demand for setting up of metro services, they were not viable everywhere, he said,

 

emphasising that other solutions should also be looked at.

 

Speaking about the Delhi Metro, he said though the ridership figures were very high, for a good part of the day, the trains were not full.

 

Work on three Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) corridors connecting Delhi to Panipat, Meerut and Alwar was on, he said while speaking to reporters later. He also mentioned issues related to alignment on the Delhi-Meerut route.