PM rides underwater metro with children

Kolkata: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday took a ride on India’s first underwater metro rail, connecting Howrah District with Esplanade Metro Station in central Kolkata, in the company of some school children. The Prime Minister interacted with the schoolchildren during the underwater metro ride and held discussions with them on various subjects of academic and extra-curricular interest.

The Prime Minister reached the Esplanade Metro Station at 10 a.m. on Wednesday after which he inaugurated a number of metro railway projects nationally, including the one connecting Howrah with Esplanade. At the inauguration programme he was accompanied by West Bengal Governor, CV Ananda Bose, the Leader of Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari and the BJP’s state president, Sukanta Majumdar. Kolkata Metro’s Esplanade-Howrah Maidan section, which passes below the mighty Hooghly river through the country’s first underwater transportation tunnel. The 4.8-km Esplanade-Howrah Maidan stretch, which is a part of the East-West Corridor, has been built at a cost of Rs 4,960 crore, officials said. The stretch also has the deepest metro station in the country -- the Howrah metro station, at 32 metre below the ground.

The East-West metro corridor, the construction for which commenced on April 14, 2009, has suffered several delays owing to various issues, including accidents at Bowbazar in central Kolkata.

The stretch between Howrah Maidan and Esplanade is the second section of the corridor, in which commercial operations would begin. With this, only the Esplanade-Sealdah stretch of the line is left to be completed.