Construction of first phase of Hyderabad Metro Rail (HMR) has been done and dusted, with the last remaining corridor — Jubilee Bus Station to Mahatma Gandhi Bus Station (MGBS) of about 11 km getting ready to be commissioned for commercial operations later this month.
In the last nine years of construction, the project for sure has undergone several trials and tribulations, but the most interesting are the changes forced upon by the metro rail authorities in the viaduct alignment and also in the stations placement. These are due to land acquisition issues, prevailing social unrest then and the uncertainty over taking the metro line into the interior of the Old City as in between MGBS and Falaknuma. Corridor II or the Green Corridor was originally planned to intersect Corridor III — Nagole to Raidurg (28 km) at Parade Grounds serving as the interchange station with JBS connected by means of a walkway.
However, the Green Corridor is also now connected to Corridor III through an extra one-kilometre-long elevated viaduct with eight piers veering away from the Bhoiguda junction towards new Gandhi Hospital and through the Padmaraonagar road towards Chikalguda but with no stations in between.
“The plan was to have a maintenance depot for every Corridor but with the Falaknuma depot on a 17-acre site not happening we had to do this link so that we can bring metro trains to the Uppal depot,” informed senior metro rail officials.
Those keenly following the metro rail construction may have noticed that MGBS was never planned to be either the terminal station for Corridor II or even an inter-change station for Corridor I — Miyapur to L.B. Nagar (29 km). With the 4 km stretch to Falaknuma given up, it became the terminal station.
Also in the original drawings, Osmania Medical College (OMC) was supposed to be the inter-change station for Corridor I & II. With Telangana agitation at its peak and strong opposition not to let any metro alignment into the premises, the authorities shifted the interchange to MGBS, pushed the OMC stations further ahead, as also Sultan Bazar station.
It led to building a complicated engineering feat of taking Corridor II & I, one over the other, for a distance of about 200 metres at Rangmahal. Then, a ‘reversal’ of about 580 metres of viaduct was also built going beyond the MGBS inter-change station for Green Corridor trains to reverse and return. “We had to do course corrections throughout to push the work,” averred HMR MD N.V.S. Reddy.
