After getting the go-ahead from the board, the Ghaziabad Development Authority (GDA) has started scouting for land to raise funds for extending Metro connectivity on two routes — Vaishali to Mohan Nagar and Noida’s Sector 62 to Vaishali.
In fact, the GDA has directed its land department to identify plots it has failed to acquire to date, officials said.
The authority hopes to fund the over Rs 3,000-crore ambitious metro projects by selling off these plots.
While the Union government is supposed to bear 50% of the project funds, the UP government will shell out 30% and the remaining cost will be borne by the agencies and departments concerned.
“With the GDA board asking the authority to stick to the original plan of metro connectivity, the fund issue still remains,” said an official. “So, the land department has been asked to conduct a audit of its land. The idea is to identify land parcels and take the same under our possession for selling them off to raise funds.”
The GDA board, in its recent meeting, made it clear that for the 5km connectivity, the original mode of commuting — the metro — should not be tampered with, by working on alternative commuting modes. As a result, the ropeway, neo metro and metro lite projects were scrapped.
“The two metro projects, as per the detailed project report prepared by Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, will cost Rs 3,325 crore. We have proposed that 50% of the cost will be shared by the central government, 30% by the state government and 20% collectively by agencies such as the GDA, the GMC and the UP Housing Board,” said the official.
“This means that the fund share of the GDA will considerably come down which will be easily raised by sale of land, whose custodian is the GDA,” he added.
It was in 2018 that the GDA had planned a metro extension project on the two routes. The estimated cost for it, according to the detailed project report submitted by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) in 2019, was pegged at Rs 3,325 crore. The cash-strapped authority stayed with the proposal for two years, eventually shelving it due to the shortage of funds and the lack of success in getting the state and central governments to agree to pay for it. In mid-2021, GDA conceived alternative modes of transport —ropeway, for instance -— which would also be cheaper to build under the public-private partnership (PPP) model. The ropeway, this August, gave way to metro lite, and a month later, the neo-metro.
The detailed project report (DPR) for a neo-metro had already taken shape when the GDA board decided to go back to the metro. Residents of the city had also protested this August and demanded that the GDA retain the metro network.
“Since the last DPR was created a long time back, we will discuss with DMRC whether there is a need for a fresh DPR. But cost escalation in all these years cannot be denied,” said the official.