The State government and South Western Railway (SWR), on Wednesday, agreed to form a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for the suburban rail project by the month-end, for speed-tracking the project.
The government agreed to give in-principle approval for the Detailed Project Report (DPR) for the project immediately, with the understanding that contentious issues can be sorted out at the stage of detailed design. The SWR had submitted the draft DPR to the State government on December 4, 2018.
A high-level meeting of the SWR and the Karnataka government, led by Chief Secretary T.M. Vijay Bhaskar, approved the four corridors totalling to a length of 160.5 km at a cost of ₹19,499 crore, as per RITES report.
The four corridors to be taken up are: Kengeri – Whitefield (35.47 km), KSR Bengaluru – Rajanukunte (24.88 km), Nelamangala – Byappanahalli (38.94 km) and Heelalige – Devanahalli (61.21 km). The State government still can suggest prioritising corridors along with extensions.
“The DPR has been pending for State government’s comments for nearly a month. To get it cleared, the SWR got this meeting scheduled. A major outcome of the meeting is agreement to finalise the DPR first, for which the SWR even offered land free of cost,” said a senior SWR official.
The meeting also decided to jointly agree on the Detailed Project Report (DPR) to be tabled before Railway Board before January 15 for final approval.
The SWR and the State government have agreed to lease 650 acres of railway land and 150 acres of government land respectively at a nominal ₹1/acre for the project.
As total of 150 acres of private land needs to be acquired for which the expenditure was capped at ₹2,130 crore as per RITES report during the meeting. The State government has also agreed to provide for a high Floor Space Index (FSI) of 5 along the sub-urban rail corridors, which is expected to be leveraged to finance the project.
In the meeting, it was decided to jointly resolve any issue of intersections with roads and Namma Metro lines in the city.
In another major development, the earlier sanctioned suburban rail projects worth ₹1,745 crore, which was decided to be taken up under cost-sharing basis between the SWR and the State government, will now be done by Railways alone.
These projects include: doubling of track between Baiyappanahalli–Hosur with electrification and automatic signalling from Baiyappanahalli to Salem, doubling of Yeshwantpur–Chennasandra line and provision of automatic signalling in Bengaluru–Tumakuru, Bengaluru–Mandya and Yeshwantpur–Yelahanka segments, apart from adding additional MEMU rakes, sources said.
