A $500-million loan agreement was signed between the Union government, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, National Capital Region Transport Corporation Limited and the New Development Bank (NDB) on Thursday for the ‘Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut Regional Rapid Transit System Project’ to provide fast, reliable, safe and comfortable public transport system in the NCR.
Signing the agreement on behalf of the NDB, the bank’s vice-president and chief operations officer Xian Zhu said the funding would be provided to finance rolling stock for modern design, energy efficient operations and interoperability across corridors.
Fund utilisation
“The NDB funds will also be utilised for procuring signalling, telecommunication and train control system with advanced features such as automatic train operation, automatic train protection, automatic train supervision and integration with platform screen doors. The project can serve as a demonstration for developing high-capacity rapid urban transit corridors in other urban areas of India,” said Mr. Zhu. The loan has a tenure of 25 years with an eight-year grace period.
Joint Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Baldeo Purushartha said the seamless high-speed connectivity will result in balanced economic development across the region, leading to economic benefits to all strata of society and many nodes of development rather than all economic activity happening at one place. He signed the agreement on behalf of the Union government.
The daily passenger traffic along the Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut corridor in NCR is estimated at 0.69 million of which 63% utilise private vehicles for commuting.
Reduce congestion
Due to traffic congestion, it can take about 3-4 hours to travel between Delhi and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh by road during peak hours.
The environment-friendly and low emission RRTS will carry many times more people at high speed (average speed 100 kmph) while occupying just 3-metre space on land, thus, reducing traffic congestion. Overall, it will significantly reduce the total emissions from the transport sector in NCR.
The total project cost is estimated at $3,749 million, which will be financed by the NDB (US$ 500 million), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (US$ 500 million), Asian Development Bank (US$ 1,049 million), Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction (US$ 3 million), government and other sources (US$ 1,707 million).
