KARACHI, May 5: The Karachi Urban Transport Corporation has initiated the process of carrying out the Environment Impact Assessment of the Karachi Circular Railway project, it has been reliably learnt.

The KUTC, which is the executing agency of the KCR, has invited organizations with the relevant experience to submit proposals so that they could be entrusted with the task of carrying out the EIA.

Sources told Dawn that a team of Japanese experts was in the city, carrying out a study on the projected number of passengers who would be using the KCR in the future.

They said the KCR was being revived with Japanese technical as well as financial assistance and the project work on the ground was expected to be started in June 2009.

They added that the project was expected to be completed in three years, give or take a few months.

Under the project, a 50-kilometre-long dual track would be laid and all the 18 level crossings would be replaced either with overhead bridges or underpasses so that electric trains running at around 100 kilometres per hour, with an interval of five minutes between two trains, could complete their journey without any hindrance, the sources said.

They added that the KCR was expected to require around 45 megawatts for its train operations.

The sources said that the project was being financed by Japanese assistance of over $ 870 million, with an interest rate of 0.2 per cent a year. The amount is payable in 40 years, with a grace period of 10 years.

The sources said that besides the 44-kilometre-long old route of the circular railway that connected Karachi City station with Drigh Road and passed through Lyari, SITE, Nazimabad, Manghopir, Gulshan-i-Iqbal and also ran parallel to the main line from Karachi City to Landhi, a six-kilometre-long new underground track would also be laid to connect the Jinnah Terminal with the Drigh Road station.

They said that since the KCR passed through the congested and thickly populated areas of the city, the entire track would be fenced so that people living near the track were not harmed by the fast-moving trains.

They said that more than 240 eight-coach trains would be transporting around 700,000 passengers from early morning to midnight daily between the 26 stations, which would be connected by the buses so that people could easily get to the station from their homes or places of work.

The fare would be fixed in accordance with the prevailing bus fare and was expected to be around Rs15, they said.

The sources said that the city’s population, which at the time of independence had been around 300,000, was, according to some estimates, now touching the 15-million mark and while the number of passengers was increasing at a rate of seven per cent, vehicles on the roads were increasing at the rate around 17 per cent, choking the already over-burdened road network.

Tracing the history of the KCR, they said that the system had been conceived in the late 1950s and was started in 1964. It touched its peak in 1984 when over 104 trains operated daily, carrying over six million passengers annually.

The so-called transport mafia was said to have manipulated the government or decision-makers in such a way that less and less resources were allocated for its infrastructure improvement, with the result that the system collapsed in 1999 when only two trains were being operated, leaving the commuters at the mercy of the transport mafia.

The sources said that another mass transit system of trams, which had transported a large number of commuters in the congested areas since pre-partition days, also succumbed to the onslaught of the transporters and collapsed in the early 1970s.

Following squeals of protests by commuters, the government reactivated the main-line portion of the KCR in 2005 with just 10 trains. However, the number of trains dropped over the years and at present around four trains were being operated.

Representatives of the Sindh government, the city government and the Pakistan Railways are on the board of the directors of the KUTC, which would be run by a managing director on a day-to-day basis.

Responding to Dawn queries, KUTC managing director Nasreen Haque said that the government was giving the KCR its due priority and things had started to move. She said the road network was already choking and with the number of vehicles growing fast it would be almost impossible to move around the city in the next few years without a rail-based mass transit system.