Indian metro projects cheapest: Urban development secretary
14 Dec 2013
Metro projects in India are the cheapest in the world due to availability of abundant manpower resources, urban development secretary Sudhir Krishna said today, PTI reported.
"I discovered that our metro projects are the cheapest in the world. I am not able to make a solid claim because corporate data you have to collect....The next highest is something that is 20 per cent more than us but generally 40 per cent more than Indian metro projects ," he said while speaking at an event organised by the CII.
He added, while India was not manufacturing all the components, the key lay in the country's large population, which allowed deployment of more people in a project, the report said.
"I have found this is a strength. Because we can break the project into different components and then bid for different components and you get the best possible competitors who are experts in those fields, whether it is the signalling system or the rolling stock or whether it is the construction of the civil structure," Krishna said.
According to Krishna, due to the high wage bills the general trend across the globe was that the entire project was handed to a single entity whose expertise was limited to only one or few components, with the rest being sub-contracted, which increases costs.
"We must capitalise on the manpower resource which we have," Krishna said.
According to Krishna PPP documents for urban projects need to be formulated in a way such that they offered inbuilt flexibility to meet all future eventualities.
Krishna noted following Independence, the focus was on "ruralisation" due to which the urban infrastructure received less attention.
He added, urbanisation had gathered pace in India and the trend now was that small and mid sized cities clocked faster pace of growth.
He said, while there was much demand for setting up of metro services, they were not viable everywhere, as he emphasised that other solutions too needed to be looked at.
Regarding Delhi Metro, he said though the passenger figures were very high, for a large part of the day, the trains were not full.
