The construction work for phase II project of Chennai Metro Rail had slowed down in the past couple of months as many workers had left home for the Lok Sabha election.
According to officials of Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL), though the work is slowly picking up now, they continue to face labour shortage. “During the election period, we were grappling with severe shortage of workers and we had only around 12,000-14,000 people deployed in various sites. As a result, the pace of construction had reduced. Now, several workers have returned to the city after exercising their franchise and are back at the work site. But ideally, it is good to have about 25,000 workers,” an official said.
Chennai Metro Rail began building the 116-km network for the phase II project, at a cost of ₹61,843 crore, with three stretches — Madhavaram to SIPCOT (corridor 3), Light House to Poonamallee (corridor 4) and Madhavaram to Sholinganallur (corridor 5), a few years back. CMRL has been concentrating on completing the stretch from Poonamallee to Porur (a part of corridor 4) first, in a year-and-a-half. “Now, we are gearing up and exerting pressure on the contractors to pump in more resources. They are making some headway and we are confident that the slow-down will not have an impact on the deadline. We will be able to open the first stretch by 2025 end,” he said.
Officials said, not just in Chennai, but across the country, there has been shortage of workers in metro rail construction sites. “Recently, one of the metro rail systems in the north had requested us to send a part of our workforce to them. But we had to refuse since we were facing dearth of hands ourselves,” he added.
Published - June 26, 2024 08:56 pm IST
