Mumbai, (The Hindu): Nineteen stations on the suburban rail network will be redesigned for seamless passenger movement as part of the station improvement project of the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MRVC).

Seven of the stations are on the Central Line, four are on the Harbour Line and eight on the Western Line. There are 119 stations on the Mumbai suburban network and most are over 80 years old and highly congested.

The MRVC will execute works at specific stations depending on the requirements at each one. The corporation will build decks and new foot overbridges (FOBs), modify existing FOBs, build connectors between FOBs of a station and between FOBs and skywalks, decongest the ticketing area, and shift stalls and kiosks where required.

No duplication

MRVC spokesperson Sanjay Singh said, “The stations have been identified after discussions with the Indian Railways and the Indian Railway Stations Development Corporation (IRSDC) so that there is no duplication in our efforts to improve passenger amenities.”

Union Minister for Finance Arun Jaitley had announced in the Budget that the IRSDC will develop 600 stations across India, many of which are on the Mumbai suburban section. “IRSDC will develop Mumbai Central’s long-distance train station, while MRVC will carry out works on the suburban train section of the same station,” said a senior Railways official.

The MRVC is building several FOBs on the suburban network, but a senior official said the FOBs built under the station improvement project would be independent of this work.

MUTP works

The project comes under the 54,000 crore Phase 3A of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP). In the last budget, a token allocation of 1 crore was made towards MUTP 3A, which includes several big-ticket railway infrastructure projects such as an elevated fast corridor between Panvel and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) and the procurement of 210 AC EMU rakes. The MRVC is currently finalising the detailed project report for it. Railway officials said the station improvement project is estimated to cost around 880 crore and is expected to be executed by 2022.