Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president V.M. Sudheeran on Thursday wrote to Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, stating that implementing the Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode Light Metro projects under the leadership of E. Sreedharan and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation would be appropriate.
Referring to suggestions that had emerged at the recent KPCC executive committee meeting here, Mr. Sudheeran said the projects should be implemented as a joint venture of the Union and State governments, especially in the light of the failure of the public-private partnership (PPP) models implemented elsewhere.
The Delhi airport metro line, the Hyderabad metro, and the Mumbai metro line 1 and 2, built under the PPP model, were failures. The Mumbai metro line 1 alone went on stream but suffered time and cost overruns. The project cost became almost twice the estimate. The operator went to court for higher passenger fares, he said.
