Next stop: Karachi Circular Railway proposals finally complete

They will be presented to the chief minister at a meeting on Wednesday.

KARACHI:

The proposals to revive the defunct Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) are finally complete. The documents which were being drafted by the commissioner's office state that an 83-foot wide corridor will be built along the loop of the KCR while encroachments along the tracks will also be removed.

Karachi commissioner, Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, held a meeting with representatives of the federal and provincial governments on Thursday and assured that the KCR project would be completed as soon as possible. He added that this was now possible as the political stakeholders of the city had joined hands to revive the project.

According to Siddiqui, the proposals will be sent to the chief minister and work will start on the project once it is finalised. He said that the project should be completed during the tenure of the current government.

The commissioner added that the project could cost approximately Rs2.6 billion and they were trying to reassess the cost during the budget.

While discussing what was being done, the commissioner said that they had tried to speed up the project and demolition of encroachments had started around Juma Goth. He added that they would relocate the encroachers or take any action against them.

He claimed that they wanted to revive an inter-regional public transit system to connect industrial and commercial areas within the city to the suburbs.

The managing director of the Karachi Urban Transport Corporation (KUTC) Shamim Sherazi said that the KCR would cover 43 kilometres from Drigh Road Station and Shahrae Faisal then pass through Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Liaquatabad, Nazimabad, SITE, Baldia, Lyari, Kharadar and touch Karachi City Station. He added that it was an important project and was a requirement for the regional public transport system in a city like Karachi.

At the next meeting which will be held on Wednesday, Sherazi said, they would submit the proposals to Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah and start working on the project.

A history lesson

The Karachi Circular Railway was constructed and opened to traffic in two phases between 1964 and 1970 till it eventually shut down in December 1999 due to a lack of finances.

In August last year, Japan agreed to give the KUTC Rs2.5 billion as a loan to oversee the rebuilding process, upgrades and reconstructing the 83-kilometre corridor which will operate 24 trains and facilitate 700,000 commuters and make three minute stops at 23 stations.

According to architect Arif Hassan, the traffic engineering and mass transit project will change the city for better as they have other cities.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2014.