New Delhi, Aug 7 (Inditop.com) Parliamentary approval was Friday accorded to a bill seeking to extend the Delhi Metro service to the national capital region (NCR), including the satellite towns of Noida and Gurgaon, with the Rajya Sabha unanimously adopting the relevant measure on the concluding day of the budget session.
The Metro Railways (Amendment) Bill accords legal cover to constructing, maintaining and operating Metro services in Noida and Gurgaon, work for which is in an advanced stage. The Lok Sabha had approved it a day earlier.
Urban Development Minister S. Jaipal Reddy, who moved the bill, complimented MPs across the spectrum for their “rare unanimity” in supporting the measure and for their lavish praise of Delhi Metro chief E. Sreedharan.
He also sought to allay the concerns of some members on the accidents that had occurred at various construction spots in the capital.
“In 11 years, there have been 130 accidents in which 102 people have died. There are global benchmarks to judge where we, as a nation, are. We are well ahead of Singapore but slightly behind London,” he pointed out.
Reddy also addressed head-on the criticism of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in a report released last month.
“The report is a blend of generous compliments and some critical observations of a minor variety. It needs to be viewed in a holistic manner. The report has not used the word ‘irregularity’. It has also not cast any aspersions.”
Attendance in the house was extremely thin and there were just about 30 members, besides Reddy, present when the debate began at 2.30 p.m. Leader of Opposition Arun Jaitley of the Bharatiya Janata Party walked in at around 3 p.m. and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the leader of the house, entered at 3.25 p.m.
The bill was put to vote soon after that and the entire exercise of introduction, debate, the minister’s reply and voting was completed in a little over an hour.
The bill seeks to amend the Metro Railways (Construction of Works) Act, 1978, and the Delhi Metro Railway (Operation and Maintenance) Act, 2002. The legislation is being amended to extend the legal purview of the Metro service to other states as Noida and Gurgaon fall in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, respectively.
The earlier law permitted the operation of the rail only within Delhi and not the NCR. There is a huge volume of traffic commuting between Delhi and its satellite towns everyday.
An estimated 800,000 people use the Delhi Metro daily.
The bill also provides legal cover for Metro services in Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Kochi and Mumbai that are under various stages of consideration.
