The Bombay High Court on Thursday granted a stay on the implementation of the Fare Fixation Committee (FFC) set up to review the existing fare structure of Mumbai Metro One.
The operator, Mumbai Metro One Private Limited (MMOPL) had filed the writ petition on June 7 challenging the committee’s recommendations.
Sources said that the committee had restructured the fare which was lower than the existing fare structure on the Metro corridor. The current fare is divided into four slabs of ₹10, ₹20, ₹30 and ₹40 for the 11.4 km long Metro corridor. “The committee proposed that the maximum fare be reduced from ₹40 to ₹35,” an MMOPL official said on condition of anonymity. According to sources the fare structure suggested by the FFC has slabs of ₹10, ₹20, ₹25, and ₹35.
In 2015, the MMOPL had proposed the fare slab of ₹10, ₹20, ₹25,₹35, and ₹45 after the last FFC had allowed MMOPL to increase its fare and devise a fare structure between ₹10 and ₹110. However, the Supreme Court in 2017 quashed recommendations of the earlier FFC along with proposals made by the MMOPL and asked for a new one to be formed. A senior official from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) said that the fare increase went against the concession agreement and was against the interest of the people, hence they had challenged it in the Supreme Court. The current FFC was formed with Shiv Das Meena as the central government representative and retired IAS officer B.N. Makhija, and retired judge Rekha Sondur Baldota, as members.
The MMOPL and the MMRDA are caught in a tussle over the actual cost of the construction with the former contending that it is over ₹4,000 crore, and the latter claiming it to be around ₹2,300 crore. A senior MMRDA official said that the MMOPL manages to cover the cost of operations and maintenance but its debt servicing is negative. Mumbai Metro One is the country’s first Metro built on a public private partnership model by the MMOPL which is led by Reliance Infrastructure (69%) followed by MMRDA (26%) and Veolia (5%). Metropolitan Commissioner of MMRDA, R.A. Rajeev said that the matter was sub-judice and they would respond in court.
