Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday unveiled the country’s first underwater metro rail project connecting Kolkata metropolis with Howrah under the Hooghly river and laid the foundation stone of various metro projects costing about Rs 15,400 crore.
PM Modi rode the metro from Esplanade to Howrah Maidan with school children after the inaugural event. During this, he also interacted with the students.
West Bengal Governor CV Anand Bose, state BJP president Sukant Majumdar and opposition leader Shuvendu Adhikari were also present in the program.
An official said that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had also been invited by the Kolkata Metro Railway, but she could not reach here due to some other scheduled program.
The Prime Minister also flagged off other train services from the Esplanade, expanding the East-West Corridor, which will criss-cross the city and its outskirts, making it easier to travel to the more than 300-year-old metropolis of Calcutta, once the capital of British India.
He also virtually inaugurated the Pune Metro from Ruby Hall Clinic to Ramwadi, the Kochi Metro extension project from SN Junction Metro Station to Tripunithura Metro Station, the extension of Agra Metro from Taj East Gate to Mankameshwar and the Duhai-Modinagar (North) section of the Delhi-Meerut RRTS Corridor. Inaugurated.
Let us tell you that the metro train will run between Howrah Maidan and Esplanade in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
The total length of the tunnel between the two stations (Howrah Maidan and Esplanade) is 4.8 km of which 1.2 km of the tunnel is 30 m below the Hooghly River, making it ‘the country’s first transport tunnel under any major river’.
Through this underwater metro, the first tunnel under the river in India will also be opened for traffic.
The tunnel is part of the East-West Metro Corridor Project, in which the stretch from Salt Lake Sector 5 to Sealdah is currently in commercial operation. The corridor was identified in the city’s master plan in 1971.
