After Magenta Line, Delhi Metro’s Pink Line to go driverless by mid-2021

On December 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had flagged off the country’s first ever fully-automated driverless train service on the Magenta Line of the Delhi Metro.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) on Saturday said that after starting driverless services on the 37 km long Magenta Line (Janakpuri West–Botanical Garden), another major corridor of the Delhi Metro, the 59-km long Pink Line (Majlis Park–Shiv Vihar) will also have driverless operations by the middle of 2021.

The Delhi Metro had resumed services with curtailed operation on the Yellow Line from September 7 after being closed for over five months. (Sanchit Khanna/HT PHOTO)

On December 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had flagged off the country’s first ever fully-automated driverless train service on the Magenta Line of the Delhi Metro.

With the commencement of these new-generation trains, the DMRC has entered the elite league of “seven per cent of world’s Metro networks” which can operate services without drivers, according to DMRC.

This was the first major event of Delhi Metro in 2020 which saw an unprecedented lockdown in the earlier months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Delhi Metro had resumed services with curtailed operation on the Yellow Line from September 7 after being closed for over five months. Its currently operational network spans about 390 km with 285 stations across 11 corridors (including Noida-Greater Noida line).

Delhi Metro had begun its commercial operation on December 25, 2002, a day after the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had inaugurated DMRC’s first stretch, spanning 8.2 km from Shahdara to Tis Hazari, with just six stations.