Bollaram will get connected to the Multi-Modal Transit System (MMTS) in Phase II, and in six months the first MMTS train will be run till there, said General Manager, South Central Railway, P.K. Srivastava, here on Tuesday after an inspection of the station.
Bollaram, Lingampally and Vattinagulapalli are set to become major hubs that will help decongest the Secunderabad railway station and this would spawn development of Hyderabad, he said on an inspection of the Secunderabad-Nizamabad section of SCR, the first he undertook with a media contingent on his special train.
“Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao is pro-active and is supportive in pushing our projects, including MMTS Phase II, with specific focus on developing the hubs. Secunderabad station has a footfall of about 10 lakh people with 272 trains arriving/departing every day. With the exception of some trains that passengers are emotionally-stuck-to, we can arrange for several express/passenger services to originate/terminate at the three hubs. From there, people can take the MMTS services, giving Secunderabad much-needed breathing space,” he said.
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Such an approach would become a game-changer, he asserted, recalling the Mumbai model where Kalyan was being developed as a hub and pointing out that he had worked on the Mumbai Suburban Railway for 14 years. Expanding public transport infrastructure around the twin cities would open up the economy, he said.
Expanding on the progress of works on the Rs. 880 crore Phase II of MMTS, he said if minor glitches could be gotten over with, there is a good likelihood of Phase II being completed by December 2016.
Phase II would vastly expand the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s limits and spawn development onto the neighbouring districts too, he pointed out.
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