The Hindu : L-G asks Jal Board to hand over land for Metro

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 22, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

L-G asks Jal Board to hand over land for Metro

By Our Staff Reporter

The Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Vijai Kapoor, inspecting the Rithala Metro Station, along with Vice-Chairman of DDA, Anil Baijal, and Director (Project and Planning) of DMRC, C.B.K. Rao on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI, JAN. 21. The Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi, Vijai Kapoor, today directed that 1.4 hectares of land belonging to Delhi Jal Board and another two hectares belonging to Delhi Development Authority near the Rithala Metro Railway station be handed over to the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation for construction of a multi-level parking lot for 4,000 vehicles.

Mr Kapoor, who inspected the Rithala station this morning along with the Vice-Chairman of DDA, Anil Baijal, and the Director (Project and Planning) of DMRC, C.B.K. Rao, examined in detail the areas around the Metro Station and took stock of the proposed District Centre being made by DDA in its close vicinity.

Observing that adequate parking facilities for cars, scooters and motorcycles should be made available in the area so that the people from nearby areas of Rohini, Pitampura and Barwala were able to utilise the station and the district centre to the optimum level, the Lieutenant Governor also directed that the entire road along the Metro Rail alignment from Rithala to Pitampura - which is about four kilometres in length - should be properly repaired and maintained so that the residents and the travelling public were able to commute conveniently.

While issuing necessary instructions to the Public Works Department in this regard, he also called upon the DDA and the DJB to examine the proposal for transfer of land in their possession near the Rithala station to facilitate construction of the multi-level parking by DMRC. The Rithala Metro station, being the terminal metro station on the 21.3-km Shahdara-Rithala route, is to be opened for the public by March this year. Upon the opening of the Tri Nagar-Rithala section, the passenger flow on the system is expected to go up from the present level of around 80,000 per day to around 2 lakhs per day.

Incidentally, Rithala has become the terminal metro station now as DMRC shelved the plan to take the line all the way up to Barwala in Phase I of the project due to paucity of urban development and population in the region. With the Rs 500-crore surplus in its hands due to the shortening of this line, it now intends taking up construction of the Barakhamba-ITO section on Line 3, which was initially supposed to run between Dwarka and Barakhamba alone in Phase I of the project.

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