Transported to the future

With the Dwarka-Connaught Place line of the Delhi Metro flagged off on Saturday, the DMRC has shown what a combination of adequate finance, modern management and technology can achieve.

With the Dwarka-Connaught Place line of the Delhi Metro flagged off on Saturday, the DMRC has shown what a combination of adequate finance, modern management and technology can achieve. To date, east, north and west Delhi have been connected to the city central. This success has spurred Mumbai to embark on a similar ambitious initiative. With DMRC's Managing Director E. Sreedharan as consultant, the Mumbai metro network is expected to begin construction by July this year, to be completed by 2010.

HT Image

The DMRC's achievement stand in sharp contrast to India's earlier such project — Kolkata's metro system, which has not moved beyond the 16 km that was completed a decade ago. It was plagued by insufficient funds, court injunctions and erratic supply of material. During the 23 years of its construction, it almost broke the back of Kolkata by the disruptions it caused. The primary reason for this, perhaps, was that the Kolkata metro was run as a departmental project of the Indian Railways, which neither provided it with quality management, nor ensured a regular flow of funds. On the other hand, the autonomous DMRC has raised funds from Japan, obtained the best technology and deployed it with the help of a skilled workforce. What the two projects have shown is that under roughly similar conditions, two different results were obtained because of changed mindsets. Add to this the minimum of government interference, no project delay or cost escalation, and the DMRC shows that project management is a specialised task and requires a great degree of dedication and technical knowledge. Mr Sreedharan was earlier involved in the Konkan Railways project and the skills used by his team there, especially in tunnelling under the old city area in Chawri Bazar, has been cited the world over.

The Delhi Metro has just got underway and already, it is changing the life of its inhabitants for the better. India's rapid urbanisation has already created a huge backlog for the sort of project that the DMRC has undertaken in Delhi. The best tribute to its achievement would be a rapid assimilation of skills — both managerial and technical — by a dozen more teams whose tasks are already cut out for them in India's teeming metropolises.