Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday inaugurated India’s first-ever driverless train operations on Delhi Metro’s Magenta Line along with the fully operational National Common Mobility Card service on the Airport Express Line via video conferencing.
According to officials, the driverless trains will be fully automated, which will eliminate the possibility of human error and after the start of driverless services on the Magenta Line (Janakpuri West-Botanical Garden), the Pink Line (Majlis Park-Shiv Vihar) of Delhi Metro is expected to have driverless operations by mid-2021.
“The National Common Mobility Card, which will be fully operationalised on the Airport Express Line, will enable anyone carrying a RuPay-Debit Card issued from any part of the country to use it for travelling on the route,” said the official.
While addressing the people at the launch event, the PM said metro has been expanded to different cities, a testimony of people’s “ease of living” being ensured by his dispensation and in coming time the metro train services will be extended to 25 cities with an over 1,700-km network by 2025 in the country.
The PM said that the central government did not see urbanisation as a challenge but used this as an opportunity and took a swipe at earlier regimes, saying they did not address the infrastructure demands of growing cities for decades.
Modi said that with the driverless metro trains, India has become one of the few countries in the world, where such service is available. He also said that the government has worked to unify services to help people, referring to measures like GST, FAStag cards, agriculture market, and one nation, one ration card.
“In 2014, only 248 kilometres of metro lines were operational in the country. Today it is about three times more with more than seven hundred kilometers. We are trying to expand it to 25 cities with 1700 kilometre network,” he said.
Tuesday, 29 December 2020 | Staff Reporter | New Delhi
